Illustration Friday: Puzzled

When Adam's dad put the ten pound bunny in Adam's Easter basket, most of the family was puzzled about how they would dispose of that much chocolate.

Grandpa, however, had an idea . . .

For this week's Illustration Friday theme, I dug out these illustrations I did for a short story I wrote a few years ago (that didn't get accepted for publication -- boohoo).

I'm drawing more these days, but nothing I'm ready to post here.  Working more on character design for one of the novels I've written that I plan to submit, accompanied by illustrations, to agents.  As I work on giving each of a myriad of characters a unique spark of life, I'm struggling to develop a more distinctive visual "voice" for my work as a whole.  So lots and lots of sketching and erasing and wadding paper into balls and starting over again with the pencil and the eraser and on and on . . . you get the picture.  Progress is happening . . . just very slowly.  I want to have a couple of presentable character design sheets and at least three polished illustrations (one of which should probably be a cover sample) for the submission package.

Swamp in color

I played around with the new Strathmore mixed media paper some more, adding color to last week's Illustration Friday "Swamp" picture with water color pencils that I then wetted to spread the pigment.  The paper dried flat without being stretched ahead of time, but I'm not sure how well the paper would handle a more complete soaking. The texture is nowhere near as fine as the hot press watercolor papers made by Arches and Fabriano.  The difference isn't all that apparent in the scan, but I really feel the difference when I'm working on it. I definitely prefer the Arches. Still, working on cheap paper often has the effect of loosening up my work.  I may have to play with the stuff a little more, just to see where it takes me. 

Illustration Friday: Return

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Big brother comes home from college for the summer a day early. Surprise, everybody!

Once again I am posting my IF late on a Tuesday. We've been celebrating a lot of family birthdays recently, making it hard to focus for extended periods. This coming weekend may be less eventful--if no one insists on a fuss over Easter.  I'd like to use the long weekend to immerse myself in my art.