Harry Potter

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

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

wee turtle

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

Greyhound

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

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

sketchbook

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

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.