Illustration Friday: Sugary

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Sweetness!

Mmmmmm, the inspiration for this week’s Illustration Fridaytopic was served at my office yesterday for someone’s birthday and it was delicious! I don’t even like cherry-flavored things but this chocolate cake was sooo rich and yummy I had to have a piece.

I’ve been surrounded by sugary things lately. Between the wedding and baby shower I was involved with there’s been a lot of cake lately (and I suspect there’s more cake at the office again tomorrow….) Now I’m trying to get back on the wagon – both for my nutrition and for this sadly-neglected blog. I did sketches for a couple of the weeks of Illustration Friday I missed, but nothing even worth posting. There’ll be more soon!

Illustration Friday: Island

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Island of Tranquility

Just a quick sketch for this week’s Illustration Friday topic: my own personal island of tranquility. Click image to enlarge.

Our household is in a bit of chaos at the moment. I just finished all the craziness for my best friend’s wedding, and now we’re dogsitting for her while undergoing our first major household renovation: a complete bathroom remodel and some carpentry work in our attic. But in our den we can hunker down with all the pets and watch TV and not think about the chaos in the rest of the house. It’s a little sanctuary for us, where we can watch our new 3rd Rock from the Sun DVDs and snuggle up and relax. In fact, that’s what we were doing while I drew this.

(I’ve been slacking and missed the last couple of weeks, but I’ll make up for it soon!)

Illustration Friday: Routine

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The Morning Routine

This week’s Illustration Friday topic is something I’m having trouble relating to lately, because mine is totally shot. I would have spent more time on the drawing but I really needed to get back to this part of my routine: my exercise routine.  No, I’m not trying to kick the TV in… this morning it was my Kathy Smith Kickboxing video, one of my faves. So just a quick scribble for this week, scanned right out of the sketchbook (tho I did take the time for a quick pencil under-drawing before the inks!) Click the image to enlarge it.

I started exercising relatively recently and it still amazes me how much better it makes me feel sometimes. And yet it’s the first thing to drop off my schedule when things get busy…

Illustration Friday: Detach

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Bereft

A slightly surreal image for this week’s Illustration Friday topic. When I thought of the idea it was a bit more lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek, but I only had a couple hours to work on it and this is what came out instead. Click the image to enlarge it.

This drawing and the one before were done on sheets of drafting vellum — an almost-transparent paper with a fairly slick surface, almost plastic-like. It’s very prone to smudging so it forces a light, quick touch. I experimented with it a while ago and it makes for really crisp lines. but I find it difficult to scan; the transparency means the ink lines tend to cast a shadow behind them on the scanner which is hard to remove without obliterating the finer lines. I suppose a film scanner might solve that problem, but it’s easier just to use another medium instead.

Since I was rushing, I made a major error in the ink drawing: The shading on the background had the light coming from the opposite direction as the figure in the foreground. I made some halfhearted attempt to fix it on the paper, and then decided that this was what Photoshop is for. I flipped the figure after scanning it (a bit clumsy with the masking, I’m afraid) and voila! Might have worked better if I hadn’t tried fixing it in ink first. It would have been even better if I hadn’t made the mistake in the first place!

Illustration Friday: Sail

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Sailing Away

Alas, I was too late to get this done in time for last week’s Illustration Friday topic, but I had the idea, I wanted to draw it, and once drawn it was darn well getting posted! Click the image to enlarge it.

This was a relatively quick drawing, and I ended up spending more time on the colors than I’d originally intended, guess I got a bit caught up in it and wanted to sail away too.

I’ve been incredibly busy lately — all good, positive things, mind you — but it’s taken away some of the time I use for just daydreaming and letting my thoughts drift away…

Illustration Friday: Poof!

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Let Me Check My Notes…
Let Me Check My Notes… (click to enlarge)

So many possibilities for this week’s Illustration Friday topic! I decided to go with a post-poof moment this time. I hope the effect comes through ok with only inks, no time for color this week. Or a background!

I think I may be reading too much Girl Genius lately. Last week I lost an evening of productivity when I got book 7, despite the fact that I’d already read it online. I love the humor in the drawings and the writing, but there’s also an intriguing mystery afoot with lots of interesting characters. Phil Foglio has a great loose style that just works, with tons of little extra details hidden in the background. I deliberately avoided too many stylistic swipes in the finished drawing, but the influence is obvious in my thumbnail sketches:

Let Me Check My Notes… thumbnail sketches

Interesting (or not) trivia factoid: these sketches were done in the dentist’s chair while waiting for the NovacaineTM to kick in. The note in the corner was a leftover snippet from a trip earlier this year, and in no way intended to be a slur against taxis in general.

PS: More mad-science-y fun can be had at Narbonic… another clear influence at work here which I will have to re-read when I have a week free sometime…

Illustration Friday: Canned

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 Canned - Sketch

I got a little overly-ambitious with this week’s Illustration Friday topic, so the drawing is still only at the sketch stage, but I was just so tickled by the idea I couldn’t help myself! (Plus some of my drawing time was eaten up by the arrival of the new Girl Genius book…) Who wouldn’t like to have a pantry full of canned gremlins, bottled genies, and vacuum-packed-pixies. Even I don’t know what she’s got in some of those jars… but she’s clearly been very busy! Click the image to enlarge it.

All of my drawings go through a stage like this: I’m tightening up the composition, working out the perspective, and figuring out as many of the details as I can in pencil so that when I get to the inks I can just concentrate on building textures with the ink lines. Thanks to my light table I can scribble as much as I want with the pencil and not have to worry about marring the surface of the paper for the inks. Sometimes I’ll paste in elements or photocopy them and move them around until I’m happy, or use an overlay of tracing paper to establish the shading and lighting without obliterating the linework — some drawings have so many layers of tracing paper on the sketch they become difficult to transfer over to bristol for inking. Right now I’m thinking I need to do something else with the lower left corner before it’s ready (maybe move the edge of the table? Or maybe that little guy in the front needs a buddy…) but I’ll have to sleep on it.

Gonna try and finish the inks over the weekend, I’ll post them as soon as  I can!

Illustration Friday: Enough

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Feast

… or really, more than enough! My rather liberal interpretation of this week’s Illustration Friday topic is one from my archives, but I’ve never used it for anything. The project it was drawn for mutated into a different format before I finished this particular drawing. One of these days I will have to scan it and finish it nicely, because I’ve always liked it, but at the moment I just have this rather poorly-shot photo to share. (click to enlarge!)
This piece is trickier than usual to scan, partly because of its size (16×20) and partly because it’s drawn on clayboard instead of paper. Although the texture is a dream to draw on with crowquills, and highlights can be scratched out like scratchboard, I can’t use my light table to trace onto it like I can with sheets of bristol — had to break out the carbon paper! And because it’s inflexible it doesn’t scan as easily on my home scanner. Also, it’s far more expensive than the bristol, but probably worth it for a very special project.

Illustration Friday: Foggy

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Pause in the Shadows

This week’s Illustration Friday topic is a tricky one for me — I was stumped for something metaphorical, and I haven’t drawn atmospheric effects in a while. Then I remembered this old image which I made a while back for a school project but never really felt happy with. Just add fog: Viola! It’s not perfect, but I think it helped give the picture the depth it was lacking before. Doesn’t do anything for the figures, unfortunately!  Click the image to enlarge it.

The character is from a story rattling around in my head. She’s slipped out in bits and pieces of prose over the years, one of these days she’ll escape entirely…
The drawing itself is from several years ago, when I was still developing my current method of coloring. It’s fascinating to me sometimes to look at how I used to structure my files.  It seems like every few years I change my tactics. I guess it’s partly an evolution of my method, and partly due to the relentless march of software upgrades. (I always seem to switch the way I organize my file archives every few years too… amazing how something that made perfect sense five years ago can seem silly now! )

ICON5

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Last weekend I attended the Illustration Conference in NYC. The whole weekend was exhausting, but a total blast! I met so many fellow illustrators from all over — from those just starting out to those who’ve been in the business for years, and those who are transitioning out of (and into) illustration to/from related fields. There was a fair amount of business talk and shop talk, but there was so much creative energy and talent on display  it was practically crackling through the air. I had the chance to share portfolios with some amazingly talented artists.

I came back home re-energized and full of ideas! Being a compulsive note-taker I did more writing and looking than sketching at the conference, but there are a few scribbles scattered around my notes.

ICON Sketch

I didn’t have a chance to participate in the big SketchCrawl that preceeded the main conference, but I heard so much about it, it’s an idea I’m definitely going to have to explore. The man who spearheads it, Enrico Casarosa, really hit the nail on the head when he talked about carrying your sketchbook everywhere but never taking it out of your bag.

The conference itself took place in a hotel in Manhatten, but I was crashing at my brothers’ apartment in Brooklyn. I found that the fastest way to make the train show up was to settle in for a really detailed sketch of my surroundings. But I managed to snag a few informal sketches along the way.

Subway Sketch

 Of course, as is the case after every conference I’ve ever been to, I’ve come down with a nasty head cold. This one totally snuck up on me Tuesday afternoon, when I thought I was “safe,” so I’ve barely had a chance to go through everything I brought back with me, much less e-mailing all the wonderful people I met… but I will! But not right now… this is the most I’ve been upright since the cold hit me and it’s time to lie down…