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!
Illustration Friday: Extremes
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.
It’s October!
Yes, we’re getting closer to Halloween, I guess that’s what I was thinking when I doodled this pair. I have a couple of Halloween-themed projects to finish up in the next couple of weeks, but instead of a brainstorming session these two characters came out pretty much full-formed from the ball-point pen. I may have to find something I can use them for….
These fellows came to life while I was listening to one of my favorite comic book author/illustrators Jeff Smith speaking at the Small Press Expo this weekend. I love doodling during lectures and talks, especially when it’s a subject matter that interests me. For some reason, if I’m sitting through a dull speaker or an uninteresting subject and I really need the distraction of a good sketch, my pen has trouble moving. It’s been a few years since I’d attended SPX, but I managed to come home with some cash still in my pocket and a small pile of new things to read. It’s aways so refreshing to see the energy, the talent, and the passion in all of the exhibitors, such a fun day!
Illustration Friday: Open
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.
Studio update
My weekends and most of my evenings are still being devoured by my studio-remodeling project. Why does painting a room always seem to take longer than you think it will?
Progress is being made, however. I was able to finish the walls and molding and put the shelving back where it belongs. I’m not able to start putting things away just yet, since I’m using the modular shelves to store the contents of the built-in cabinet under the window while it gets its turn under the brush, but it’s one step closer. And it makes it a heckuva lot easier to work in this small room.
The cats are still quite confused by all of this, especially when I close to door to the only room of the house with its windows open. But now that things are settling down a bit they’re making themselves comfortable. My tomcat’s going to be very disappointed when I fill the shelves back up.
Of course, I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t fretting over the details at this point. I’ve been prepping the built-ins while I decide if I really like the color I picked out for the cabinet doors. I fear it may be a bit too pink, but I’m planning on covering part of it with some kind of bulletin board anyway. I want to introduce a nice light green into the room too. I haven’t picked out my curtains yet, so those will influence any additional accent colors. I’ve still got a few stores to check out, but some of the stripes from JCPenny’s are looking pretty good. Haven’t seen one yet that I’ve fallen in love with tho…
Further updates soon! And hopefully some more drawings!
Why no scribbles lately?
The short answer is: chaos!
To celebrate my finally achieving my MFA, and to give myself someplace a little nicer and more pleasant to work in, I am finally decorating my studio. It is the smallest bedroom in our house, but gifted with ample built-in storage. Unfortunately, even that is still not enough for my huge stash of reference books and the large flat files I use for finished artwork. Not to mention all the miscellaneous craft supplies, souveniers, and other junk I accumulate.
Way back when we moved in, lo these 2 years ago, it was the weekend before the beginning of the semester, and I was still in the MFA program. As a result this room was thrown together quickly and with little to-do, made functional enough for me to get by. In addition to all of my art supplies the room was also home to stacks of boxes and other bits of random furniture which we didn’t know what else to do with at the time. The room was packed. It was perpetually a mess, with only the area around my drawing table clear and only the art supplies I was using for my thesis work at all accessible.
So for the past few weeks the room has been disassembled as I’ve been going through all of the furniture and boxes and sorting out what needs to stay and what really should go. Among the things discovered when going through some of this buried “treasure”: two boxes of financial paperwork, my missing dip pen supplies, a stereoscope and large box of images to go with it, and a huge stash of family photo albums left behind by Dad when he sold us the house.
I don’t have any true “before” pictures; those accompanying this post are after the initial clean-up phase when I was testing my chosen paint colors. It’s the boldest color I’ve ever put on a wall outside of a theater production, but there won’t be a whole lot of the actual wall showing when all’s said and done.
Since I’m mostly only able to work on it on the weekends and some evenings, and I wanted to keep up my drawing as much as possible at the same time, It’s been taking over a month so far. The room had not been thoroughly cleaned in years, so the woodwork required a bit of scrubbing before I could start priming it. There is quite a bit of woodwork in this room considering its size. There was really no place to easily relocate the few large pieces of furniture, so I had to get creative about working around them.
I did have a little bit of help with this project: my resident Tall Guy painted the ceiling for me. It’s the one painting task he feels comfortable with.
And he wasn’t the only one “helping.” I suspect I could have done a little better without the contributions from the fuzzy faction of the household, but this one in particular was having a ball hiding under the tarped drawing table for her patented “surprise attack”
I’m almost done with all the painting… photos of the finished product coming soon!
Illustration Friday: Visitors
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.
Illustration Friday: Captain
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.
Technical notice
So, not that I expect anyone is actually keeping that close of an eye on this humble blog, but just in case, I wanted to apologize for the downtime Thursday-Friday. Actually, my ISP should be apologizing, but they haven’t even given an explanation to me about what went wrong. Things seem to be up and running again tho, knock-on-wood. Carry on with your lives….
Bunny!
Here’s just a little peek at a small personal project I’ve been working on:
It’s ink on drawing paper with a little colored pencil. I’ll post the rest later…