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.

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.

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.

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.

For this week’s Illustration Friday topic ‘surrender’, I decided to draw a Rubick’s Cube; something I give up on before I start.

All this talk of the 21 May apocalypse reminded me of a village notice board I saw a while ago, which read:

On Sunday 10.30am, Holy Communion at All Saints. 10.30am, All-age Worship at St. Mary’s. A memorial service will be held at St. Mary’s on Sunday at 3.30pm at which everyone can light a candle and remember loved ones who have died. On Wednesday Noah’s Ark will be sailing from the Village Hall at 1.45pm.

That’s right. Noah’s Ark will be sailing from the Village Hall. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

I could say that seeing my daughter, Jude’s basketball shoes in the hall gives me a sense of déjà vu (this week’s Illustration Friday topic) but that would probably be because I owned a pair when I was her age.

I actually remember the first time I experienced déjà vu. I was about 7 years old and was lying on the floor in front of the fireplace, playing with some plastic animals and figures on the cold, tiled hearth. I knew it was the first time I’d played that game in that place, but I had that compelling sense of familiarity that, even when I think about it now, still makes me question my memory of things that have happened… and of those that haven’t.

It’s a little late (the home-made paper chains have been packed away) but I’d still like to take this opportunity to say ‘Happy New Year’ to all my friends, family and all the amazing illustrators I’ve met through Illustration Friday. Thank you for your comments and support – wishing you love and luck for 2011!

I was struggling again with this week’s Illustration Friday topic ‘mail’, until my friend Phil said he was thinking of drawing something wrapped up for posting…

I guess this technique could be loosely classed as a digital collage. The form itself is an observational piece of a hip-high, strange looking bird made from lovely tarnished metal that I received for my birthday a couple of years ago. He reminds me of the two herons my husband and I used to look out for every morning on our way to work. We named them Chester and Rameau. If we were lucky they used to swoop alongside us from bridge to bridge as we cycled the canal towpath.

I’m not sure this guy is actually a heron. He doesn’t have a name yet, but I’m open to suggestions.

I thought this week’s Illustration Friday topic, ‘phenomenon’ was really tricky. I decided to produce a simple line drawing of a wooden sculpture I have of the seated Buddha (with the hand gesture showing teaching) adding texture with Mr Retro filters.

In Buddha’s spiritual teachings, the realisation that all phenomena are empty of any inherent reality – that it is the mind that brings a perceived object or event into existence, is what leads to inner peace.

One of the most important philosophical insights in Buddhism comes from what is known as the theory of emptiness. At its heart is the deep recognition that there is a fundamental disparity between the way we perceive the world, including our own experience in it, and the way things actually are.

Śūnyatā