astro croc...

For no other reason than I felt like it, here is a crocodile in a space suit...

Butterfly...eye...eye...eye...

Some fool went and chopped off the end of February...?! Who ever heard of a month with 28 days in it... That's why my a little bit bunny submission this (ahem... last...) month is running late. The creature is butterfly, here's a sneak peek. Pop onto ALBB for the full thing.

IF "poise" - ongoing pachyderms...

Still exploring treatments for the story characters. This illustration uses the elephant cut outs and charcoal line overlay (with modifications) from the earlier post. With these cut outs as a guide I used watercolour on some really nice cotton rag paper I'd forgotten that I had. Expensive paper for an off the cuff experiment but I've had the paper for ages, too scared to waste it before now (the reason I'll never feel at ease using moleskins as sketch books...). It really is an interesting paper to paint on as the coarse open grain bleeds the paint in unexpected ways while the heavy weight allows for fairly controlled washes on unstretched sheets. After compositing the various elements in photoshop I chopped up the body further to give me more points of articulation for posing in the illustration. I'm really enjoying the balance (no pun intended) of dynamism against quirkiness which this unplanned pose approach gives.

Revised Ravens

Looking at the Halloween piece again I had to tweak things to make for a more balanced composition. I've also put some quick digital colour on a pencil study that I did in order to get in a 'raveny' frame of mind.

IF - "repair" & A Happy Halloween to all!

With Halloween so close I couldn't resist combining this weeks Illustration Friday with an All Hallows Eve greeting. I was also inspired by a fascinating account I found of how an individual raven called Grip became the inspiration for both Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" AND a character (appropriately a Raven...) in Dicken's "Barnaby Rudge". So here's an illustration of a couple of cheeky ravens showing just how smart they are by putting all the pieces back in the jackolanterns.