smoke

wind

I managed to get this finished before I have to pack up my computer to head back home from my parents' house, still it's fairly quick. I wanted a sort of old sepia photograph/hand-tinted feel. I'd love to make an etching like this and then hand-tint it, where is an etching press and acid bath when I need one?!

smitten

This was an Illustration Friday entry from a few weeks back that I didn't exactly finish. I think it's mostly finished. (Ah, but mostly finished is still somewhat unfinished!) This blog has taken even more of a backseat because of some health issues in my immediate family. Everyone is okay now, and things should be getting back to normal soon.

blue

From last week sometime.

Haven't you always wanted...

A monkey?



Or maybe even several monkeys? I did most of the work on this before we went on vacation and it's been bugging me that I hadn't finished it. But, now I have! Come on, you know the rhyme... No more monkeys jumping on the bed! If you are anything like me, you'll have that rhyme stuck in your head for awhile, and for that I am sincerely sorry. But if it makes you feel any better, I had it stuck in my head for a week while I worked on this and the only way to vanquish it is to finish it. I'm not exactly sure how many hours it ended up being, maybe somewhere around the ten to fifteen mark? It's deceptive because this version is so small, but it would print out at about 8.5 x 11 size because I painted it in Photoshop at 300 dpi so it's bigger (hence, took longer) than you might think. I'm really quite pleased with it. Definitely something to add to my portfolio, I think, I'll have to get some quality printouts of it.

animal alphabet

A link from one of my illustration blogs led me here and this fellow said "Give a one hour alphabet a try!" So I did. If nothing else it's good "exercise" and I got a kick out of it!

p.s. if you can't figure out why some of them are letters, a few are a little obscure... for instance, the pig is there because it's an ungulate, and the squid-thing is a nautilus. And that's... ahaha... an x-ray fish. No joking. It was listed in my encyclopedia but there was no picture so I just made it up. Any problems? I didn't think so.

opposites

The last time I posted an illustration here, there were a few people who asked about the story. I don't really like spelling it out entirely - I prefer things to be open-ended and preferably to tell their own story. That said, I'll write a little more about this one and what I was thinking while I was working on it.
I imagine that the colour of prejudice and missed opportunity is a sort of a muddy, pea-soup green. I also think that a true dichotomy - polar opposites - seldom exists. There is too much nuance in life for that, and sometimes if you look deeper you may even find that what you thought was true is... exactly the opposite.

Rain

My submission for Illustration Friday this week.