Thursday, February 5, 2015

ARTIST'S CHALLENGE: DAY 4

Today's images are faces, all done not long before Gabriel was born. I really enjoyed working on these and have been thinking for a long time about doing more of these: both of people and cats.




Wednesday, February 4, 2015

ARTIST'S CHALLENGE: DAY 3

Today's group of images are full length images of women in various modes of dress, done in various types of media. 

























This woman with a crazy hairstyle on a terrace on some other planet in a galaxy far away was done in pen and ink and watercolor. It was based on a doodle I had made while trying not to be bored to death at a weekly production meeting at a book publisher I had been working for at the time. It was around the time Episode 1 of Star Wars had been in the theaters and I was really inspired by the costumes and the hair. That was probably the best thing about that movie, as for the rest of the movie, meh.






































This pirate is done entirely digitally using Adobe Illustrator, which really was a challenge since it doesn't really involve drawing as I normally think of it. I started with a pencil sketch but then creating the rest with vector based shapes was really challenging.  This had been done as an illustration for the Illustration Friday concept "Surrender" and I had posted it to this blogs back when I first created it.






This girl on the dark background is done in acrylic pain on wood and that was partially inspired by an early American portrait I had seen at the Clark Institute which I redid with some Goreyesque overtones. I call it "Ghost Girl."


Monday, February 2, 2015

ARTIST'S CHALLENGE: DAY 2

The theme for today's edition is "Mice and Food."

The first two illustrations are from the Town Mouse and Country Mouse, in which the town mouse is sharing a snack with a spider, while a cat lurks just outside the mouse hole and  the country mouse is sharing conversation and a bowl of cheer with his friend the frog, without any signs of danger outside the mouse hole.



This third illustration is a silly invitation I had made for my father's 70th birthday party. Yes, there are 70 candles! The mouse in the red sweatsuit is a character my father made up for silly stories he would tell us when we were kids and even when we were in high school.




Sunday, February 1, 2015

ARTIST'S CHALLENGE DAY 1

I was nominated by my husband's cousin to do the ARTIST'S CHALLENGE and for Day One, I posted three scenes from the Three Little Pigs. In 2003, I had taken a collage class where one of the assignments was to illustrate a scene from the The Three Little Pigs. Before I had started, I quickly sketched out the entire story before picking a scene. I ended up redoing the scene in watercolor because it was a medium I preferred and then in 2006, completed several more pages. Here are the three from the artist's challenge.




And here is one more that I didn't use for the Artist's Challenge: