This is rooster boy. He’s had his heart broken, and has been up all night lamenting the fact; I suppose to us it sounds like crowing.
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All right, I have to confess: I was working on another project and realized that a.) I’d have no time for this week’s Illustration Friday, and b.) the project I was working on fit (albeit loosely) the theme. So, I went with “The Heart As Primary Equipment for Living”.

The drawing is my interpretation of a Mexican loteria card. It was done on illustration board with pencils and ink. I scanned it (the original will be painted for that other project), and brought it into Photoshop for coloring and texturing.

I like that offset, hint of screenprint feel. Seems old, a bit magical, and slightly beyond understanding.

This week’s theme for Illustration Friday is “Fearless” and… I fell into the most basic design trap ever: locking on to the first idea you get, and not being able to shake it. Or, maybe I just really liked the idea of this ferocious little dog named Fearless. The dog went through many iterations (sketches below) as it took me a bit to get the pose and facial expression right. Even then, I did quite a bit of facial tweeking once I brought it into Illustrator.
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I really admire the work of Charles Burns and thought I’d take a stab at the technique he uses. I’ve no experience with brushes, so I would simply try to emulate the brush strokes with my pens. I found a face I liked online, sketched it out in my notebook and then inked it with my Microns.

So…exactly what DID happen to the inks you might be asking? Clearly this is far too clean to be hand drawn (um, at least by me anyway). Well, let’s just say that things were a little harder than they looked…
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The theme for this week’s Illustration Friday is “Cocoon”. As I had just wrapped up a hand-drawn art card and was in sketching mode, I ended up busting out the pen + ink and doodling. I’ve no idea what kind of odd insect/animal/person would emerge from this cocoon, but I’m happy with the way it turned out. I colorized it in Photoshop, and added some extra touches in Illustrator (I just like its bezier tools better).
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I’m participating in an art card swap, with the theme “self portrait”. The basic gist: create + submit a 2-1/2″ x 3-1/2″ piece of artwork, which is then compiled by a curator and displayed online. Then, randomly receive someone else’s artwork in exchange for yours. Kind of neat.
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I’ve had Andrew Bird’s Armchair Apocrypha playing non-stop tonight, in an attempt to get through some “real” work without actually losing my soul. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not normally like this. I enjoy my work, for the most part. But tonight, I couldn’t shake these lyrics and they made me want to do something real. Not “real”. So I quickly captured the words in a rough image and I feel much better. And my soul thanks Mr. Bird for that. Good night.

Well, the coloring of this illustration went a little quicker than expected! As explained, I tried to capture the consequences of not having looked “ahead”. Hopefully it’s clear that the cab driver is encountering a situation that he wasn’t expecting.

Had some difficulties with the skin tones; couldn’t get enough contrast and the line work got a little lost. Also, probably should have spent some time coming up with a more interesting background. Think I’ll focus on that on the next one.
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I’ve decided that to overcome my inherent laziness, I’d resume participating in the weekly Illustration Friday activities. This week’s concept is “Ahead”, for which are shown the scanned sketch and the *very preliminary* coloring. I went with “not keeping your eyes ahead”; now that I think of it, I wish I’d drawn the character texting. Dang.

Well, we’ll see how it turns out on Friday.