Category: Illustration Friday

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Drawing Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Quiet

Quiet
Drawn and painted using Painter & Wacom tablet (click image and select “all sizes” to enlarge)

I had a few ideas for this week’s Illustration Friday challenge and this one seemed the more upbeat–the other two involved coffins and dead people (they are very quiet, though maybe not too attractive).

I love libraries and anything having to do with books. My “day job” is for a literacy organization and all of my co-workers are also book lovers. I have fond memories of family trips to the library when I was a kid, and also with my sons when I became a parent (and now with my little next-door-neighbor kids).

I really like drawing with the Wacom tablet and Painter when I’m trying to make a picture up from my imagination rather than drawing from life or a reference photo. I can keep sketching and just let images appear–not being exactly sure where I’m going. It’s fun to see who and what appears on the screen. Because I can keep erasing and trying new things on new layers and move things around, I can keep sketching a scene without throwing away tons of paper or sitting in a pile of eraser stubble. It seems a little like sculpting–carving an image out of a bunch of scribbles.

Technical stuff that probably nobody is interested in:
I’m still having trouble with converting Painter files to Photoshop — even if I convert to TIFF as the Painter tech support guy told me to do (because Painter converts it’s files to CMYK instead of RGB when it creates a Photoshop-compatible file), golden yellows look lemon colored. But I have determined that it’s not a problem between to my two computer screens. I opened the Painter file side by side with the Photoshop file on my desktop PC and could see that it was Painter/Photoshop problem not Desktop monitor/Laptop screen. The good news is I’ve learned how to use yet another function in Photoshop: Using Image/Adjustments/Hue-Saturation and tweaking the hue of the yellow channel solves the problem, without having to buy a new screen or anything else. This is also helpful when correcting scan color problems.

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Animals Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Phobia (Acrophobia)

Phobia (Acrophobia)

UPDATE: This illustration was sold to and published in Cedar Wings, the inflight magazine of Middle East Airlines, AirLiban, Issue #99.

This week’s prompt for Illustration Friday is the word “Phobia.” I have a pretty bad fear of heights, though I wouldn’t call it a phobia since it doesn’t prevent me from being in high places. It just makes me feel a little sick. Standing on the edge of cliffs always makes me feel like there is a powerful gravitational force pulling me off the edge (my stomach starts churning just thinking about it). Driving up steep hills I feel afraid the car is going to fall off backwards–I have nightmares about this occasionally–and it too makes my stomach churn. Maybe it has to do with my being tall–which always makes the ground seem far away?

I did this entirely in Painter, first sketching on the Wacom tablet using a digital pencil and then drawing with digital ink on another layer, then painting with the the digital airbrush because I haven’t learned how to use the other brushes yet. When I saved the file as a Photoshop file and looked at it on my other computer that is color callibrated, the colors were way off again. So I resaved the file in Painter as a jpg and the colors saved OK (not perfect though–the white clouds are pink and I had to adjust the color of the green land because it was too lime green). But little by little I’m learning how to work with this fun new art tool.

Tomorrow, Saturday, September 22 is the 10th International Sketchcrawl. I’m planning to go to the SF crawl and should have some sketches from SF and Sausalito to post tomorrow (if I’m not too tired tomorrow night!)

 

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Animals Drawing Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Change (Diaper)

Diaper Change

Here’s my second Illustration Friday idea for the topic Change. This was fun to draw in Painter but I used my laptop so I could sit at my drawing table instead of standing at my desktop computer. But the desktop monitor is callibrated and the color stays the same regardless of the viewing angle. Unfortunately that’s not true for my laptop. So when everything was finished on the laptop and I transferred the file to my desktop computer to use Photoshop’s “save for web” feature before uploading, I discovered that the colors were horrible. Half of the picture was piss yellow and hideous.

An hour later, mucking around in Photoshop, and it’s sort of fixed. It’s all a learning experience but I’m going to have to figure out how to work comfortably and still have the color turn out right. Any tips greatly appreciated!

(Here’s my other Illo Friday submission this week.)

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Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Change (Climate)

Climate Change

This is the first of a few ideas I want to play with for this week’s Illustration Friday topic: CHANGE. I’m trying to learn how to use Painter IX and each time I do I find another level I know nothing about. I’m starting to get some basic understanding but it’s really challenging. So here’s this post…now on to the next drawing. (And here’s a link to it if you’re interested.)

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Animals Illustration Friday Life in general Sketchbook Pages

Illustration Friday: (Ant) FARM

Illustration Friday

Before this week’s theme (Farm) was posted Friday morning, I was trying to take close up photos of some ants that were carrying around a chunk of kitty kibble on the bathroom sink. I don’t think they carried it there–maybe the cats dropped it? So when I saw that the topic of the week was “Farm” I immediately thought of those Ant Farm kits that I always wondered about when I was a kid.

My whole house is really an ant farm. The bathroom ants are the stupidest since usually there’s nothing for them to eat but toothpaste. The living room ants are travelers. They come in through one crack between the wall and the floor and go out through another nearby. The ones in the yard travel around managing their herds of aphids on the roses and bushes. The kitchen ants stay away from food or trash and instead hang out by the sink which makes it quite convenient to wash them away. The ant problem is minimal these days, since I discovered Ortho Home Defense (doesn’t smell and safe for kids and pets). Before that I felt like I was living in an ant farm! You just spray the stuff around the perimeter of the house once a season and the ants are gone. I guess it’s the end of a season (sadly).

I did this in Painter, which I’m trying to learn. It’s taking some time to get used to drawing on a piece of plastic that you can’t turn to draw in different directions. And when I moved the file from my laptop to my desktop computer I discovered that the colors were appearing much lighter on the laptop than they really are. My desktop monitor is big and calibrated and the laptop isn’t, but I can use it on my drawing table.

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Animals Drawing Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Illustration Friday: Safe (Safe Version)

Safe-bears-web

Nice and safe and cozy. Now scroll down to the Risky version of “Safe” or click here to see it.

I originally drew this as a little pencil sketch in a notebook on BART yesterday. Today I scanned and enlarged it, and printed it on a sheet of paper I pulled out of my Raffine sketchbook. Then I inked over the printed pencil lines and painted it with watercolor. (I don’t like working in this Raffine sketchbook because the spiral binding is too big and it annoys me but I’ve discovered I can put the pages back when I’m done painting them. I know this would be considered sketchbook heresy to some but it works for me.)

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Animals Drawing Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Illustration Friday: Safe (Risky Version)

Snake-Unsafe-Safe
It’s best to use protection if you’re going to get close….

(I’m noticing from the comments that some people don’t get what the protection is…Is it my drawing that makes it hard to tell it’s a condom? Should I redraw to make it more obvious? Did you get it? )
I drew the snake on the left in ink in my sketchbook, painted it with watercolor, scanned it, and then in Photoshop, added a new layer and painted in the “protection.” I placed the two images side by side in a new Photoshop file.

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Animals Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages

Illustration Friday: Run

Illustration Friday

I did this sketch from a photo I took at Golden Gate Fields in the very early morning when the jockeys are training new horses, running them around the track. I actually intended to do an ink drawing, but after a couple of unsuccessful but fun drawings with a Micron Pigma brush pen, I decided to start with a pencil sketch and THEN do an ink drawing and add watercolor. But I ran out of time, so here’s the pencil sketch.

I feel a little lame doing such a literal take on RUN but I’d been wanting to draw from my horse photos and the other options I thought of didn’t really grab me for drawing them (running out of time, running the show, river running, a Broadway run, running for office). I liked Michael’s suggestion (a nose running) a lot because it made laugh and was really original–but it was his idea, not mine.

I used a .5mm mechanical pencil in my 9×12 Aquabee Super Deluxe sketchbook.

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Drawing Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Match(o)

Match-O
Click on image to enlarge.

Get it? Match, Match-o, Macho man? Oh well.

It’s better than my first idea, which was a cartoon of what used to happen, back in my smoking days in college, when I’d screw up this corny old joke. Someone would ask, “Gotta match?” and I’d try to be funny and would mean to say: “Yeah, your face and my butt!” Except I’m horrible at telling jokes and I always got the punchline backwards. So I was going to draw a cartoon of a guy asking me, “Gotta match?” and me saying, “Yeah, my face and your butt.” And then me looking perplexed. But I figured I’d have to do all this explaining anyway so I drew Match-O man.

I drew him in ink and wasn’t totally happy with the ink drawing and didn’t feel like starting over so to “save time” (in quotes because I actually then spent two hours learning how to do a bunch stuff in Photoshop and I could have redrawn it in much less time) by cleaning up the drawing and coloring it in Photoshop.

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Drawing Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Play: Meercats for Illustration Friday

Play-Meercats-web

At the Oakland Zoo this summer, the Meercats played continuously while we watched, chasing each other, pouncing, play-fighting, and kicking up dust. Meercats are actually from the mongoose family, not cats, but they play just like kittens.

When I saw that the word for Illustration Friday this week was “Play” I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do anything with it. I knew that the IF site would be loaded with pictures of little kids playing or putting on stage plays and I was having trouble thinking of anything original. Plus I was worried I hadn’t been doing enough playing in my own life and wondered if I should just go outside and play instead of staying indoors trying to come up with an idea. But then I came across a photo I took of Meercats at the Oakland Zoo and decided to paint them.

I PLAYED with the image a bit too, adding the foreground and background Meercats to the picture that weren’t in the photo. I drew in pencil, then inked and added watercolor in Aquabee sketchbook (but probably should have used watercolor paper as I pushed the paper a little further than it likes to go).