Illustration Friday: Save

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The Monkey and the Dolphin
The Monkey and the Dolphin (Click to Enlarge)

This week’s posting for Illustration Friday is from my archives again. This is another one from Aesop’s Fables, one of his less-well-known stories The Monkey and the Dolphin. It’s the story of a dolphin saving a monkey… sort of:

A Sailor, bound on a long voyage, took with him a Monkey to amuse him while on shipboard. As he sailed off the coast of Greece, the ship became caught in a violent storm. The ship was wrecked, and all the crew were thrown into the water and forced to swim for their lives. A Dolphin saw the Monkey struggling, and thinking he was a man, whom dolphins are said to befriend, he went to help him and carried him on his back straight for the shore.

When they arrived within sight of Piraeus, the harbor of Athens, the Dolphin asked if the Monkey if he were an Athenian.

Yes,” answered the Monkey. “Certainly. I’m from one of the most noble families in the city.”

“Then of course you know Piraeus,” said the Dolphin.

“Oh, yes,” replied the Monkey, supposing that it was the name of some distinguished citizen, “He is one of my most intimate friends.”

Infuriated at these falsehoods, the Dolphin dived to the bottom of the water and left the lying monkey to his fate.

It’s a little grim, but I really couldn’t resist the chance to draw a picture of a monkey riding a dolphin.

Not much more time to chat this week. It’s been a bit hectic around here, as I’ve had on my graphic-designer hat reformatting a lot of my older work for reuse. Between that and spring maintenance taking up most of my “art time” I haven’t even had time to finish my new drawings, much less visit anyone’s blogs — I’ll get caught up soon! My frog from a few weeks back is just waiting for a few hours of quality coloring time, and he has a friend in the same situation… I want to post something new here before I disappear on my trip at the end of the month, darnit!

Illustration Friday: Homage

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An Appointment Kept
An Appointment Kept 2006 (click to enlarge)

So, I was looking for some different, older, partially-aborted but more-directly-related-to-this-week’s -Illustration-Friday-topic images… but I couldn’t find them. I just got my new backup drive, but I haven’t gone digging through my archives yet to populate it. Somehow we’ll all have to console ourselves with this piece instead.

It’s not directly an homage, but it’s definitely the result of years of reading wonderful fantasy and sci-fi authors who have brought the unreal to life. Yes, I went through an intense Anne McCaffery phase, lol, but read voraciously and doodled fan artwork from many others, including our dearly departed Arthur C. Clark. In particular, I was also inspired by the art of Michael Whelan, who’s used the covers of those books and many others to bring vividly to life countless dragons, aliens, otherworldly landscapes, and the very human people caught in their midst. I’d always admired the rich colors and detail in his artwork and the obvious attention he pays to making sure the the book cover was true to the story inside. (It’s a pet peeve of mine when it’s obvious that a cover artist has no idea about the actual story they’re illustrating… but it does make me a bit sad that this narrative style for book cover art is out of vogue these days.) Is it a weird coincindence that his artwork graced the covers for many of my favorite genre authors? His cover artwork clearly takes the design of the book cover into account, but remains interesting on its own too. Even though I’ve focused on a very different medium, he’s definitely one of my earliest and enduring inspirations.

Detail from “An Appointment Kept”

This is one of the larger ink drawings I’ve done so far — the original is on 19×24 bristol, with most of the details drawn with teeny tiny 005 Micron pens, scanned and colored digitally. It was made as a fine-art piece for display; this image and the rest in the series weren’t from any story in particular but from a general idea for a story I’ve had floating around in my head. I was sooooo sick of drawing foliage by the time I was done, but even I’m amazed at how it looks in a 30-inch-tall giclee print. These low-res images hardly do it justice, alas.

Illustration Friday: Pet Peeve

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Pet Peeve
(click to enlarge)

Just a rather hurried sketch for this week’s Illustration Friday topic. One of my current pet peeves actually involves my pets: we simply cannot keep fresh flowers in the house, for they will be eaten. If this bouquet had any freesia in it my cat  already ate it, that’s his favorite. But it turns out he likes tulips just fine. And the other one would have fished out all the baby’s breath to play with; she doesn’t eat flowers but she likes to chew on crunchy things. They will actually show some restraint as long as someone’s in the same room, but as soon as your back is turned….

Alas, all of the living plants are already taking up the few sunny cat-resistant shelves so bouquets tend to end up in weird, high-up nooks and on top of bookshelves.

This was a very quick drawing, but I think it only really shows in the cat’s face (which I’m not that happy with). Flowers and background stuff can be rushed but faces… that’s usually asking for trouble.

PS for anyone curious about last week’s drawing, the zoo now has a bouncing baby boy elephant, 290 pounds, born just a few days after I posted about it!

Illustration Friday: Heavy

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I’d done some sketches for this week’s Illustration Friday topic but all those ideas went out the window when we went to the zoo over the weekend.

Elephant Mother
(Click to enlarge)

This is Felix. She is 22 months pregnant and could give birth any day now. African Elephants are pregnant for so long, that the “due date” is more like a “due month” and the earliest they were expecting the birth was over a week ago. The keepers were taking her out for a walk around their enclosure and making her jog around a bit for exercise. Elephants can lumber along pretty swiftly when they want to, but poor Felix was doing the elephant equivalent of waddling. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed like you could see the shape of the baby when she was moving.

I think if she hasn’t given birth in a few more weeks, they’ll start thinking about feeding her spicy foods. Baby elephants can weigh 200-300 pounds when they’re born, and I’m sure Felix is at least as anxious as the zookeepers to welcome her little one into the world already.

Illustration Friday: Garden

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This week’s Illustration Friday topic actually fit quite well into a personal project I’m working on. Alas, at the end of a hectic week where I barely had time to do any drawing at all I managed to get the main figure sorted out, but the garden part of the composition was eluding me. Not even enough to post the sketch.

So instead, a treat from the dusty archives:

Flower Fairy: Petunia
“Petunia” (click to enlarge)

Yes, flower fairies, not the most original I admit. But always fun!

Fresh out of college back in 1996, when the internet was shiny and new and full of nerd jokes and little else, I thought it would be a great idea to make and sell notecards. What a concept, right? Well, I had no cash, no real plans, and was severely lacking in clues as well, but I made a handful of designs — cards, bookmarks, mini-posters — ran them off at Kinkos and tried to sell them a local flea market where the tables were cheap and a friend was scraping a few extra dollars a week giving tarot readings. Some, like these, I colored with watercolors and colored pencil.

They didn’t really sell. Eventually I got a job that actually paid the rent and another that let me buy food too, and with my weekends thus occupied the remaining inventory have sat in a box in the back of various closets for a very long time.

Flower Fairy: Tending Phlox
“Tending Phlox”

(I also thought puns like this were hysterically funny at the time.)

It amuses me to look at these now as I’m embarking on the 21st-century version of the same exercise. I’m tempted to add these to the lines I’m making now, but I might have to redraw them first. The odd proportions don’t bother me too much, but the head on the petunia fairy makes me wince, and these were two of the best in the series. At the least I’d recolor them digitally.

 I’m really hoping to stick to my plan and post an update every week — with a preference for new work! But I’ve been busily filling up my schedule for the spring and it now includes  lot more travel than I was planning. If at all possible, I’ll post while I’m away but there’ll be at least something here every week that I’m home, that’s a promise.

Illustration Friday: Leap

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Leap into it

I’m running a little late on this week’s Illustration Friday topic… I liked the idea so much I wanted to give it the full treatment. So here it is, about halfway through the inking stage. There are still pencil lines for most of the background, you can just barely see them if you click to enlarge. I wasn’t going to include a background (they take forever) but this one will go well in the product line I’m working on. I’ll post the finished artwork sometime next week.

I was doing a lot of research this week on print-on-demand product purchasing. This image would be one I’d like to put on notecards, prints, maybe some other things. What do you think?  For now I’m looking at the all-in-one fullfillment services that can handle the sales end of things for me, like CafePress or Zazzle, but ideally I’d like to have some printed nicely, maybe even letterpress. Still working on my inventory of images, but some of the ones already in this blog will probably be showing up there too!

Illustration Friday: Multiple

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Sketches: Rat

Time was a bit short this week for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, tho I found it quite intriguing. I’m in the midst of a project, which will be a series, which could fit, but it’s still in progress. So that’s what I’m posting today: work in progress! As always, click to enlarge.
Like many artists, every piece I make starts out something like this. Once I have my basic idea I doodle and sketch until I’ve worked out all the proportions, poses, and details to my satisfaction. Because I work in ink I have to get as much figured out in the pencil sketch and underdrawing as possible, while I can still erase easily. Sometimes there are layers of tracing paper and/or photocopies of previous sketches taped down as I refine the layout. Sometimes these sketch pages are more satisfying than the finished piece! Usually there’s one that really stands out on the page, but sometimes it’s harder to choose.

I was looking for some of my older work that would qualify, but couldn’t find anything already digitized. Which has me a bit worried, since one project was done digitally. when I have a chance this weekend I’m going to have to go through my miscellaneous backup CDs to look for it. I’m forcing myself to be better about backups, but I don’t have the same hardware for my home system as I do at work, which automates the process so I don’t have to think about. In fact, I have redundant multiple backups at work, which has saved my butt more than once. But at home my backups tend to be in batches of CDs which can get a bit messy as each one is in whatever filing system that seemed like a good idea at the time so the same file might be on more than one disk but in a different folder.  And after two house moves and three computers every now and then I uncover another stash of disks, but I think I’ve gotten them all now. What I’m overdue for is a big session of going through all the disks with the multiple versions of my files and the final versions of everything to make multiple copies of my master archive. And getting a decent firewire drive. Can’t have too many backups!

Illustration Friday: Theory

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And now, for something completely different…

Ptolemy vs Copernicus

This sort of illustration is representative of what I do at my graphic design job. Here it is in its original context; it’s a very simplified explanation of the concepts because it’s for schoolkids. I much prefer drawing small furry animals, but there’s not too much call for that at this job!

This week’s Illustration Friday topic hits a bit close to home. I work with scientists all day, and some of them get very picky about how people use words like “theory”. To a scientist, a theory is a proven explanation for why a particular thing behaves the way it does, and has been thoroughly tested, with observable results, by many different people. A theory, in this more formal use, is something which has been proven scientifically to be true until some new observation reveals it to be false. I know a few astrophysicists who are driven nuts by the phrase “string theory” because it’s really just a hypothesis.

The theory that the earth was the center of the universe was around for a long time, and Ptolemy thought he had figured out all of the details as perfectly as possible. In this case, the “proof” was mathematically predicting where the planets would be in the sky as observed from Earth at any given moment in time. The problem was that while his model was very close, it wasn’t quite perfect. There was some variable that wasn’t being accounted for.

Copernicus’ theory was a lot closer to being accurate, but he was  also wrong about many of the details. It took much more precise measurements of the planets’ movements (made possible by Galileo’s use of the telescope) to find evidence that scientifically proved that Copernicus was on the right track and Ptolemy was wrong.

Over the centuries, mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers have worked to refine that theory, using new calculations and observations to make changes and expand upon it. Copernicus’ theory looks foolishly simplistic, compared to what we know now. Even today scientists are discovering new things like dark matter and dark energy that make them adjust their theories about the universe again. But all the time they are making their theories more and more accurate and precise. And everytime something doesn’t quite add up, they know that means there’s more to discover than they can see… yet.

Illustration Friday: Choose

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Choose!

Right now I’m making lots of choices, and some of them can be a bit scary. Sometimes it’s almost easier to pick between two unknowns, leave things up to a random fate, than to make a reasoned decision that ultimately has to match up with what your gut is telling you…

This week’s Illustration Friday topic had me a little stumped, so I decided to embrace my current life-drawing kick. Ye olde traditional hands study! The pencil sketch for this was done using my own hands in the mirror. (And it sure is fun drawing your own drawing hand that way , let me tell ya!). I have a cheap-0 “full length” mirror in a wooden frame that I keep loose in my studio for times like these; I can position it however I want to get the angle and light I want. This finished drawing is with my brush-pen, which is starting to get interestingly scratchy, with a little work with the Micron. Not quite happy with the sleeves yet, I wanted to tone it more, both with the inks and with photoshop, and it probably needs to be re-cropped, but this week I’m playing catch-up from being sick last week – with a lot of extra, atypical busy-ness thrown in – so I’m not sure I’ll have time tomorrow to revisit. This one is solidly in the “scribbles” category!

Illustration Friday: Blanket

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Blanket Time

I could probably relate a little too well to this week’s Illustration Friday topic. I stayed home from work for a couple of days with a minor but unpleasant stomachache. One of those things where you’re fine sitting still but everything lurches when you move around. Bleah. I spent most of the past two days curled up with a sofa – spent more time with my DS than with a good book I’m afraid, the effort of picking a new book to read off of the bookshelf (and I do have plenty sitting around waiting for me) seemed a bit overwhelming at the time. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Since I was feeling fuzzy anyway, I picked up the good ol’ Ebony pencils for this drawing instead of the inks… love those things, especially on a nice toothy drawing paper! It could use a little more work but I’m still not at 100% right now.