Illustration Blog

IF: Garden

2008-03-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure this is what our Labrador thinks when he looks at our garden space. Luckily, he hasn't yet realized that the things growing in it are carrots - and highly edible. Here's hoping our luck holds out for this summer too!

Lady White Snake

2008-02-04T13:04:00.001-08:00

I drew this the other day intending it to be for Illustration Friday, but I didn't get it done in time. I'm not happy with the colours yet, hence - just the lineart for now. The IF theme was "Tales and Legends," and this is a drawing based on a Chinese legend I found called Lady White Snake. It's pretty cool, snake woman looking for love kind of thing. She and her friend Blue get caught out in the rain and this young man lends them his umbrella. Then they flirt. So that's what that is all about, anyway.

Otters

2007-12-13T08:42:00.000-08:00

I think of this as still a work in progress because there are some things I need to adjust, but regardless, here's what came out of the otter sketches thus far.

Otter sketches

2007-11-22T12:56:00.000-08:00

More stuff for the class I am taking. This is to illustrate a story about an otter.

I did this first page of otters before I had seen an otter reference photo, hence, why they are so wonky. They do get better as they go along.

Such as these ones - some of which are coming along.

And these, which I felt were starting to show a bit of personality, people particularly seem to like the one sitting with its leg up? I don't really know why.

Anyway, page four of otter sketches. I wanted to play around with how very bendy they are. Seriously, you should watch them sometime. It's as if they don't have bones. Well, they do, but you know what I mean.

What do different otters' faces look like? And some otters running.

Some little thumbnail scene planning, wet/dry otter (electrocuted?) and extremely long-armed otter at the bottom. I don't know, don't ask. Don't stare at the deformity.

My favourite page thus far, because I think the movement is really starting to come together.

Children's Book Illustration class

2007-11-16T16:50:00.000-08:00

These are some illustrations from a class I'm taking now. I'm afraid I don't have the story in front of me, so this is just a synopsis from memory. Anyway, this was our first assignment, character design. We were given three short stories to choose from (short equals... about two hundred words is my guess). I chose the one called "Why Cats Hate Mice." Basically, the dogs and cats have been fighting for over a thousand years. The cat king decides that he's sick of the fighting, so he proposes that the dogs and cats should make peace. So they draw up a peace treaty, which the cat scratches to sign, and the dog "makes his mark in the manner of dogs," you do the math, and so they're at peace. Then a dog who has been traveling comes back and says, "Hey cat, growl!" and the cat he threatens says, "Whoa dude, we're all at peace now, didn't you know?" and the dog says, "As if," and the cat says, "No really," and takes him to the attic to show him the treaty that they signed. They hid it in a bag of oats. I don't know why exactly. Except that when he opens the bag of oats, he finds the treaty has been chewed by mice and it's all in pieces, and the dog says, "What a liar! Woof!" and then they're at war again. So dogs hate cats because they think cats are liars, and cats hate mice because they ruined their peace treaty.

You may guess that I took some creative liberties with the specifics of the story just then. Heh. Anyway, we were to design two characters from the story, and the most interesting to me were the cat king/dog king. Here is the first page from my sketchbook, to figure out the details of the cat king. I don't know why I segregated them like that, it just made sense to me. These are from the week of October 4th - 11th.

Does he wear clothes, or doesn't he? Should he stand upright, or shouldn't he? Sort of realistic, sort of not? These are things I was thinking about as I did them.

I really liked the stripey fat cat in these second ones (on the right side of the page) but in the end decided that he was a bit too sweet and sort of huggable to be the king. Vince suggested that he might be more like the cat who meets up with the dog at the end of the story - you know, he hasn't been at war for awhile, he's pretty happy and just relaxing. I can see that, so if I were actually illustrating this it'd be a definite possibility.

More:

Ideas for the dog king. Vince teased me that the German shepherd at the top was kind of like the George W. Bush of dog kings, like, "Hey - pull my paw! hyuk hyuk." It was very funny, but sort of turned me off him, though I like his tattered cloak. As you'll see from the next ones, I was ultimately won over by another breed of dog for the king. It's funny, but I needed fewer pages and ideas to find the dog king, I think because dog breeds tend to be fairly distinctive. I'm sure cat breeds can be, too, I just don't know very much about them.

This is a bonus page, as it has not just cats but ALSO dogs. I like the cat king on the litter. Get it? Ahaha. I kill me.

Finally, and without further ado, dog king and cat king. I decided to go with the younger "radical ideas" cat king as opposed to the grizzled veteran. I love the dog king and his little bone ornaments, and the cat king's fish necklace. Haha. Is it okay to laugh at your own ideas? I hope so, because I totally do. So there you go, those were my final designs, the next assignment was to use them to develop a scene, which I will share later even though it definitely needs some tweaking.

Maya

2007-11-16T01:04:00.000-08:00

I happened across this in my D&D folder the other week and was pleasantly surprised - I totally forgot I ever did it! This is my most current D&D character for the Savage Tide campaign, Maya Damartha. She's a Rogue 3/Wizard 5/Arcane Trickster 2. I'd say that this is the first character I've had that has been higher than level nine, but I don't want to jinx it.

wolf

2007-11-16T01:01:00.001-08:00

A wolf watercolour from the other day.

portrait party

2007-10-05T12:43:00.000-07:00

This is one half of a portrait exchange I'm doing with my buddy Angela, specifically, my half, a portrait of her. I'll post hers of me when it's done. Meantime, if anybody wants to do a portrait exchange with me, let me know! I can't submit this one to the actual "portrait party" until we've got both.

get in on the party here, or at least read the rules, and disregard if necessary. I'm currently available for portrait exchanges with any interested parties.

Studio photos

2007-10-05T12:12:00.000-07:00

Considering that we renovated and finished this room, um... back in April, I thought I could post some pics. It's not as clean as this anymore (art begets mess, or vice versa, at least for me). Some of them are just photos from when I was going to life drawing evenings regularly. I hung them up for inspiration because they usually just see the inside of a portfolio. Coincidentally, the months I was going to these classes were almost always older, naked men. You should have seen my poor grandparents when I showed them this room! Simply scandalous.

view from the door

from the desk, or thereabouts

my shelves, I love these shelves

closeup on magnetic poetry, also a few watercolours (it was a girl that night!)

some other watercolours from those evenings

this model came with all sorts of props (hats, ski poles, bike helmets, scarf).

ink drawing to the left, to the right a lithograph from when I had access to that sort of thing, the middle is acrylic, my muses.

Anyway, it's a happy place and I really enjoy having a space I can spread out and make a mess in and my mess doesn't intrude on the rest of the house. Not featured is the dog bed I drag in so that Rufus can keep me company while I'm working on things. A dog bed can make anyplace homey.

Harry Potter

2007-08-02T23:32:00.000-07:00

Caution: If you have any intention of reading the latest Harry Potter book and haven't yet done so, the following image is kind of a spoiler, and the text after it definitely is. You have been warned.

So this is how I imagine Teddy Lupin and Victoire... I guess Victoire Weasley? That's a bit of an unfortunate name. But I think she can pull it off. A couple of things I thought while drawing this: I can totally imagine Bill and Fleur's daughter being really pretty and smart (Ravenclaw) but I don't think she'd just go along with the dress code. Hence, dragonhide boots and argyle Ravenclaw socks. I also got kind of sad thinking about the character of Teddy because I loved Lupin and Tonks. They were more or less my favourite characters in the series, so their son...yeah. I figure he'd wear a Weird Sisters shirt 'cause by the time he's 19 they are probably "classic rock," and he knows his Mom was a fan for sure. And of course he's a metamorphmagus like Tonks was, so he can do whatever he wants with his appearance but he opts for sideburns and eschews pink hair (except when he gets tired of people saying he has his Mom's eyes, then he might flash bright pink hair just to be a bit saucy). This is what I think, anyway. Anyway, I had a lot of fun with those and now my eyes are dry and squinty from being hunched in front of my computer. I also have an unenviable Wacom Pen Blister, so I think it must be time to hit the sack.

hide

2007-03-08T12:16:00.000-08:00

For Illustration Friday, this week's topic is "hide."

wee turtle

2007-02-23T14:03:00.000-08:00

Illustration for a baby's room I did, last year in July sometime.

Greyhound

2007-02-23T13:59:00.000-08:00

An illustration I did for a postcard. We adopted an ex-racing greyhound for one day before my husband's allergies went haywire. Apart from the sadness of not being able to keep her, I liked the postcard itself.

Mervyn

2007-02-23T13:55:00.000-08:00

This is from sometime last year. He collects rocks, that's pretty much all. It's nerdy, I know.

sketchbook

2007-01-11T12:02:00.000-08:00

here's some random pages from my sketchbook. It's a new moleskine I got for Christmas and I am loving it. It does all of the things that make me happy, like have smooth pages and accept ink without bleeding and even let me paste stuff in without the pages going all wonky.

From around Christmas. That's Rufus (our dog), and my Mom's Christmas tree.

More dogs, dogs are good. Left is Rufus, right is Schaeffer (parents' dog). You have to be quick to draw dogs at Christmas, as they don't stay in exactly the same place for very long. p.s. - Can you tell how crotchety Schaeffer can be? I think even just his posture in the top drawing speaks of "Bugger off and leave me alone." But it could be just because I know him so well.

smoke

2006-11-09T14:59:00.000-08:00

wind

2006-11-01T17:37:00.000-08:00

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

2006-10-31T20:07:00.000-08:00

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

2006-09-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

From last week sometime.

Haven't you always wanted...

2006-09-12T13:26:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-16T22:57:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-26T12:04:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

My submission for Illustration Friday this week.