I’m trying to get back into the habit of posting here, after several weeks of slacking. The remodeling bug has hit and my studio was only the first room to fall victim! But part of the purpose of all this remodeling is so I can focus more on my drawing, so I’m trying to keep my hand in at the same time. I think some of my IF pieces are going to be more sketchlike for a while, as I’m trying to use them to work out the areas where I’m weaker. I’m also probably not going to color most of them unless I’m particularly moved, to make sure I’m not relying on the coloring too much.

This week’s Illustration Friday topic proved a challenge, as I find faces one of the most difficult things to render in pen and ink, and hats – much like shoes – are difficult to draw so they look right. I went through one of the fashion magazines I have on my bookshelf for times like this and found almost every single picture of people wearing hats. There weren’t many, considering the size of the magazine, and most were all taken from the same couple of articles/ads.  Ink over pencil sketches, photographed out of my sketchbook instead of scanned (hence the dubious picture quality this week, sorry). Some of the faces came out better than the others, but most bear the marks of being drawn from photographs. Although one of them was drawn out of my head – can you tell which?

And you think YOU have it rough when it’s “that time of the month”….

I drew this for a Halloween greeting-card exchange with some friends, but it also fits for this week’s Illustration Friday topic. Don’t eat too much candy tonight!

 It’s amazing sometimes how quickly things can shift from one extreme to another, isn’t it?

Just a very quick doodle for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, getting back into the habit. I’ve been doodling a lot of little monsters lately, must be the holidays. But I’m still working on adding detail to the drawing from last week, I think it will make a good portfolio piece when I’m done. I’ll take another photo this weekend to show the progress so far but I haven’t had as much time to work on it during the week as I’d hoped.

Hi! It’s been a while, but things have been quite busy lately. Still, I think I got a little overambitious when tackling this week’s Illustration Friday topic. My drawing is only about half-finished, but enough is done for me to feel comfortable posting. I’m going to finish it anyway, because I really like how it’s going, and I’ll post the updated version when it’s available. If you click to enlarge the image, you can see some of the pencil lines still there under the ink lines. It’s pretty clean because I traced it very lightly onto the bristol from my sketch drawing — I love using my light table. There’s a lot more shading and crosshatching to do before I’d consider it done.

My studio is finally usable again, but there are a lot of finishing touches left to go. I have a couple other drawing projects that have been waiting in line while the remodeling was going on, so I should have some more to post very soon.

This week’s Illustration Friday topic reminded me of something that happened with a friend of mine this summer. She just moved to a place where she could have a little backyard garden, which she’s been enjoying. It’s a rowhouse, and her next-door neighbors had set up some hummingbird feeders, so she’d also been enjoying watching the pretty birds come around.

One day she was watering her plants near that side of the yard, being very careful so as not to frighten the many hummingbirds that were at the feeders that day. Suddenly, one of them flew right up to her. She was both amazed and nervous as he stared her straight in the eye for a good long while. Wondering if he was going to attack her, as ridiculous as that seemed, she didn’t know what to do until finally the tiny bird flew away back to the other yard. We still don’t know why, but suspect it had to do with reflections on her glasses.

I used a little reference this week, but not too much. It’s not a very good likeness of my friend, I’m afraid, and the greenery is a bit more generic than usual, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out for a quicky. My light table and a lot of my reference material are packed up as I’m remodeling my art studio right now. The drawing was done on a small piece of bristol with Micron pens and the coloring was all done in Photoshop.

Excuse me for getting a bit fangirl for a moment, but while I was pondering this week’s Illustration Friday topic we were sitting down for a rare evening in front of the TV. We’re still working through the first season of Battlestar Galactica. Actually, I was more interested in drawing the senior Adama because Edward James Olmos has such an interesting face, but technically he’s the Commander so I drew his son Captain Adama instead. Just a relatively quick drawing from a photo.

I didn’t do any tracing, but I don’t usually work directly from a photograph like this. Athough I use photos a lot for reference, particularly when drawing a particular type of animal or specific bit of scenery, I usually end up straying pretty far from the source. I prefer to use photos to get a good enough feel for my subject that I can “pose” them however I like, but that’s a lot of work for such a quick portrait – and this one was pretty quick.

OK, I might be stretching this week’s Illustration Friday topic a bit, but it seems to fit! This is one from the archives, because I was working on another personal project this week, which I’ll be posting later. This was an academic piece where the assignment was to illustrate a traditional phrase (of our choice), working in paint on illustration board. I can’t say it’s one of my best works, I’m not as comfortable with paint as I am with ink and it’s from a time when I was still struggling with my total aversion to drawing backgrounds, but I still like it.

EDIT: Jason finally finished his own essay for this week’s topic!

Has anyone seen my keys? I swear I set them down just a second ago, where could they have gone? Aaarrrgh, this seems to happen every time I’m running late….

The idea for this week’s Illustration Friday topic came quickly — it happens to me ALL the time — and was drawn just as quickly. Not too happy with how it came out, but I wanted to get it posted, and time is short this week, as we just returned from vacation.

Once again this week, my husband has taken on the challenge of a short writing assignment of his own.