In weather lore, a closed pine cone forecasts rain.
It’s been a good while since I submitted anything to Illustration Friday, so it’s a very quick one this week to get back into the swing of things; a live trace of a line drawing in Illustrator, a layer of flat colour and then another layer of texture in Photoshop.
This is the technique I use for a lot of my illustrations because I love the screen print effect I can achieve from the flat fill, and also the collage effect from adding texture. It’s good to be back!
This week’s Illustration Friday prompt ‘dusty’ reminded me of some writing I did about my bookshelf a while back, and so I thought I’d do an accompanying illustration and share it:
I can see by the curtain coloured light that my bookshelf has gathered a week’s worth of dust since it was left this morning. I’m not surprised; bookshelves, like dreams, defy linear time. For all my wildness dust coats the shelves and my plants wilt when I don’t water them. The phone lies on the floor for want of a longer cable. I unzip my boots and drop my bag, hat and scarf.
I’ve drawn my favourite book, Naïve. Super by Erlend Loe. A fantastic read which touches on the concept of time and it has lists – and lists are at the top of my favourite things list. You can read reviews here.
Posted in Creative writing, Illustration, Illustration Friday
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Tagged Art, Books, Bookshelf, Creative Writing, Dusty, Erlend Loe, Illustration, Illustration Friday, Line drawing, Naive. Super, Sketch, Typography
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I do like playing around with type but I haven’t really done anything for a while so I thought I’d submit something type-based for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, ‘chicken’.
I’m working on this retro space rocket illustration for an ongoing project. It’s still very much work in progress, but seemed perfect for this week’s Illustration Friday topic ‘journey’.
This started out as a quick sketch, which I passed to my friend Phil who created a 3D visual in SketchUp for me to work from. He was able to tilt and position the model at the exact angle for me, before giving me a wireframe that I could then import into Illustrator and work up. As this is a retro space rocket, I couldn’t resist finishing off with some funky Mr Retro filters in Photoshop.
Phil is an illustrator and visualiser and also regularly submits to Illustration Friday. You can visit his blog here.
Posted in Illustration, Illustration Friday, Vector
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Tagged Illustration, Illustration Friday, Illustrator, journey, Mr Retro, Retro rocket, SketchUp, Space Rocket, Vector
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For this week’s Illustration Friday theme, ‘afterwards’ I wanted to illustrate something that made me think about the event beforehand.
These beads and bangle were on display in a glass cabinet in the National History Museum, London. The cabinet contained a strange assortment of items that had been discovered inside the stomach of a Nile crocodile (who was also one of the exhibits in the same cabinet).
The beads themselves were very pretty, semi-opaque glass on quite coarse twine and looked handmade, not unlike the bracelets and necklaces my daughters have made me over the years. I guess it’s pretty grisly but I try to imagine the journey they’ve been on before and after the crocodile incident; from when they were strung together through to me drawing them and writing about them this morning.
Posted in Illustration, Illustration Friday
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Tagged Art, Beads, Bracelets, Collage, Crocodile, Illustration, Illustration Friday, Illustrator, Line drawing, National History Museum
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We spent the royal wedding weekend in beautiful Llanymynech where we bought these multi-coloured free range eggs by putting our money in an honesty box by the roadside. You can see a Flickr slideshow of Llanymynech here.
It’s so sad to read about the National Grid’s Mid Wales Connection Project plans to lay pylons through the British countryside in Shropshire and Mid Wales, and that beautiful Llanymynech is on one of the proposed routes.
There has to be an alternative, so I’ve signed the petition at People Against Pylons.
