Category: Illustration Friday

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Cartoon art Digital art Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages

Illustration Friday: Sign (on the dotted line)

Illustration Friday

Drawn on paper and digitally colored in Corel Painter

I planned to try to finish two acrylic paintings this weekend but yesterday I spent the day at the San Francisco Sketchcrawl (I’ll post that story and those pics tomorrow) and today I got distracted by this week’s Illustration Friday challenge and this image that word brought to my mind. After tending my roses, getting in some exercise, having lunch and taking a nap in the sun in my backyard, I followed my muse and did this drawing that wanted to come out and play.

Now it’s time for dinner but my lovely neighbors just brought me a beautiful plate of fresh grilled salmon and salad so I don’t have to cook. I can eat and then get to work on those paintings.

Yay! A much needed day of rest and fun!

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Cartoon art Drawing Illustration Friday People Sketchbook Pages

Illustration Friday (redux): Citrus (Juggler)

Citrus-juggler2

Ink in sketchbook then digitally painted in Painter

My Illustration Friday post yesterday was lame. I didn’t have a single interesting idea of what to do with citrus other than a literal drawing of a lemon. But today I had another idea and quickly sketched it and then spent an hour or so coloring it in Painter. Now I feel better.

Actually, I feel better about my IF post and my back is feeling 50% better today. The work my physical therapist did on me yesterday and the exercises she gave me that I did today seem to be helping. I do miss being able to lay in bed with my laptop looking at blogs but she warned me that it’s about the worst thing I can do for my back. I’ve had lower back problems forever and know how to care for it but never had upper back pain until I started reclining with my laptop.

Yippee! Getting better…makes me want to jump for joy and dance and juggle citrus!

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Illustration Friday Painting Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Illustration Friday: Citrus (leathery old lemon)

Citrus (old lemon)

Watercolor on Arches paper, 10×8″. To enlarge, click image, select All Sizes

I hadn’t planned on doing Illustration Friday today but when I saw that the topic was Citrus I remembered the giant old lemon from a co-worker’s tree that’s been in my fridge for a week. I’ve been squeezing it on veges and into salad dressings and it was still going strong, though a bit squished. I’m not sure how this rendition ended up being so not-lemon colored. I should have stopped painting sooner though I like the way the little scalloped plate turned out. Too bad the topic isn’t little blue plates.

Last night a combination of back pain and a prank caller ringing my phone five times made for a bad night. This morning I called the number back (thanks to good old caller id) and told off the guy whose house it was. Apparently it was a 10 year old girl fooling around with the phone (but why was she up phoning me at 2:30, 3:30, 5:30, 6:30, and 7:30?). I’ve now blocked their number in case she tries again! Argh! I’m off to try for a better night’s sleep.

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Cartoon art Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Polar (Bipolar)

Polar (Bipolar)

Digital illustration in Corel Painter started from scanned sketchy ideas drawn on the back of a receipt sitting on the kitchen table.

This week’s Illustration Friday challenge is “Polar.” I first thought of polar bears of course, but I did a polar bear illustration before for Illo Friday when the word was DANCE. Next stop on the train of though was “bipolar.” I hope that this image won’t be considered insensitive. I’ve done some reading about bipolar disorder in relation to artists, since many famous artists and writers have had this disorder. Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry who is also bipolar wrote Touched By Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament and An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (bipolar disorder used to be known as manic depressive illness).

I was inspired to do Illustration Friday today because I received an email this morning from the editor of an-inflight magazine for a middle-eastern airline asking for permission to use my previous illustration for phobia in an article they’re publishing on phobias. The internet is sure amazing the way it connects people all over the world!

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Animals Drawing Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages

Busby “Buzz” Berkeley – Illustration Friday

Buzz

Pencil sketch/study for monotype. Aquabee 6×9 sketchbook.
(To enlarge, click image, select All Sizes)

I’d been planning to work on sketching my cat Busby, also known as Buzz, to prepare for doing a monoprint of him today so it was convenient that today’s Illustration Friday cue is “Buzz.” Here he is! My next step is to do the drawing again with brushpen and ink, trying to work out making it just black and white. I want to see how extreme I can take it — how few lines and shapes are needed. But that will be tomorrow because…

Tonight is the opening party for my brother-in-law Tim’s show of his photos about building (and burning) the temple at Burning Man (photos) last year. So it’s off to the Lucky JuJu Pinball Art Gallery in Alameda, CA to party instead of painting. Here’s one of Tim’s temple photos:

dscn2812.JPG

Photo by Tim Englert 

More on Buzz tomorrow…

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Animals Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Invention

Invention

Drawn and painted using Painter digital tools.
To enlarge, click image, select “All Sizes”
This week’s Illustration Friday cue is “Invention.”

I visited the nearby Point Isabelle dog park to sketch today and noticed that everybody had these ball-flinging and picking-up devices. This wonderful invention allows people to exercise their dogs without having to get any exercise themselves. They don’t have to run or walk with their dogs, bend down to pick up the ball, or use any energy throwing it. All they have to do is drive to the dog park, get out and fling the ball while the dog runs around.

Aside from not getting exercise, it’s actually a pretty cool invention, especially for people whose dogs slobber all over the ball, or for people like me who throw the ball so that it hits the ground a few feet away.

I’ll post my ink and watercolor paintings from the park tomorrow.

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Cartoon art Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Clear

Clear
Drawn in pencil, scanned, inked & colored in Painter digitally
(To enlarge, click image, select “All Sizes”)

After a few weeks of being too busy to participate in Illustration Friday, I’m excited that I was able to play again. The topic is “Clear” and I had several ideas: the plastic replicas of a man and woman whose internal organs are visible through their clear plastic “skin” that I had as a kid, a clearcut forest, a bottle of liquid with sediment that is settling until the liquid is clear, a woman with a clear mind and a not-clear mind, but I when I started doodling around with this one, clear (the table) it was the most fun to draw so that’s the one I picked.

Half way through, Painter did another one of its bloop–magic–everything is now gray, too bad–tricks. One minute everything was fine, everything but the line drawing was completely gray and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Finally I tried opening a new file and copying and pasting the two layers I needed into it and it worked. Painter is the most unstable program I’ve used in many years. At least I’ve learned to save every couple minutes. If it wasn’t so late I’d go in and clean up some fuzzy edges but it’s good enough and I’m off to bed.

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Drawing Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: GHOST (True story)

ghost_001

Drawn and painted digitally in Painter. To enlarge, click on image and open “Ghost (Large version)” on Flickr.

When I was a kid my mom made a ghost costume for me out of an old sheet, cutting holes for eyes and arms. Unfortunately it kept slipping around and I couldn’t see where I was going. It was also too long so I kept tripping on it. After about one block of trick-or-treating I stepped on the hem, tripped and fell, getting a nasty bloody nose. Then I had a really cool and scary Halloween costume!

This is a re-do of the drawing I wrote about yesterday that disappeared after working on it for two hours when Painter crashed and I discovered I hadn’t saved the file ever. Painter tends to be very glitchy that way, and I should have known better. I tried to recreate it today and it’s a little different, but better in some ways, and so am I, having learned a few good lessons!

I had a hard time getting the text to look right on screen when I shrunk thefile to fit on the screen. I finally had to reduce the “canvas” size to 450 px wide and then put the type in. Now I see why people use Illustrator. Pixel-based type is terrible if the image isn’t created at the final type size and you have to reduce the image size but Illustrator doesn’t have that problem.

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Animals Drawing Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Illustration Friday: Smitten

Watercolor version

Ink and watercolor in Raffine sketchbook
(Click image, select “All Sizes” to enlarge)

This week’s Illustration Friday word is “Smitten.” My original idea was to draw my Los Angeles sister’s rescued dove and parakeet that have formed a loving pair and live in a big cage in her little living room. I was going to ask her to try to send me a picture of them but remembered she doesn’t have a digital camera and I couldn’t really remember what they looked like. I guess it wouldn’t have really mattered since I just made this bird up anyway, without looking at any photos.

I started by drawing the idea this morning on a piece of scratch paper that had all sorts of other stuff on it so I couldn’t use it directly. I put the sketch on my Wacom tablet and drew over it, getting the drawing into Painter. Then I redrew it and experimented with trying to get the lines cleaner, but realized there were too many things I didn’t know about using the bezier curve tool and I was too tired to learn them today. I messed around with it in Painter way too long, trying out different backgrounds, trying to draw a cage, etc. I wasn’t happy with the way it looked painted in Painter (see below) so I printed out the line drawing layer on a piece of paper ripped out of my Raffine sketchbook. I painted that in watercolor (above) and stuck it back into the binding. I’m feeling less “smitten” by digital painting today and much more in love with watercolor.

Smitten-Digital version

Digital version done completely in Painter (blah)

Categories
Animals Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages

Illustration Friday: Trouble

Trouble

Digital art done in Painter
Click image to enlarge and select “All Sizes”

I immediately thought of my cat Fiona when I saw this week’s Illustration Friday cue: “Trouble.” She’s always getting into trouble: chewing on electric cords, wrestling with my socks until they’re in shreds, jumping on my head when I’m sleeping in the middle of the night, or walking across a painting and tracking wet paint everywhere…I could go on and on. So I decided to get even and give her a little trouble, even if it’s just in a picture. (But don’t worry, I have no cat door, no raccoons, and love little Fiona dearly, even though she is a naughty girl.)

I also thought of raccoons because I know how much trouble they can cause. My friend Susie had a family of them living in her attic, which was a terrible nightmare since they were were not at all house-trained and had no manners when it came to eating walls and other important stuff. If you’ve seen the cult documentary, Grey Gardens you know what raccoons can do to a house. I knew someone who had a pet raccoon when I was in college. It was really sweet, with the softest little leathery hands, but frequently tore the place apart, opening all the kitchen cabinets and feasting on their contents.

A technical note: Yippee! I’ve solved the Painter conversion problem. I bought a new monitor to hook up to my laptop and ran it through it’s color calibration program before painting. When I transferred the file to my desktop PC with Photoshop, the colors transferred correctly. I could see that the laptop monitor’s colors were lighter and duller, thus requiring me to use stronger brighter colors that, when transferred, were way too strong. The new LCD monitor can also be flipped to vertical (portrait) mode which is too cool! What a difference having a 20″ monitor instead of a tiny laptop monitor to draw with.