Big batch of September sketches

As you can see, I was in a rather pensive mode in the middle of last week.

On Sunday, I did a bunch of quick sketches of people in church in my little Moleskine again.  It's a lot easier to draw the folks sitting in the pews than it is to draw the musicians and the pastors, who keep moving on me.  

When I'm out of the house, I'm usually drawing with a ballpoint pen.  At home, I tend to use pencil, at least for preliminary sketching.  I think I'll try practicing more with using the pen at the outset.  See if I can develop a more confident ink line.

Now I need to go do my sketch for today.  I'll post it with my next batch.

Illustration Friday: Robot

Illustration Friday: Liquid

Maxwell had little experience with liquid media.  Needless to say, his new supervisor was unimpressed.

(In the interest of avoiding accidents of the kind depicted above, no actual liquid was used in the creation of this pen-and-ink drawing. The "ink" is courtesy of Corel Painter 12.)

IF: Book

I am a great lover of books, so I did not have to look hard to dig up an image for this week's Illustration Friday challenge.  Books appear in so many of my pictures.  So do rats.  And kids.  The raven's a bit more unusual.  This is a piece I drew a couple of years ago, just for the sake of building my portfolio.

Illustration Friday: Messenger

I honestly didn't think I'd get another image posted before Christmas but, when this week's Illustration Friday topic popped into my email inbox, I remember this little drawing I did a while back.  My wee gerbil messenger seems to have gotten herself lost, and I don't think that sign's going to help her.

Carrot carrying rats

Here's another picture of rats stealing food

because there just aren't enough of these creatures in the world...

Illustration Friday: Rat Brigade

I had already started inking this picture when the Illustration Friday email with this week's topic (brigade) arrived in my inbox.  That was good timing!

(Click to enlarge.)

It was intended to be a companion piece for last week's Illustration Friday "round" picture.  This one:

I have an idea for a third image to go with these.  One that would use the two characters in the image below

that I haven't used yet.  Spotted them?  They're the two on the left.  

Wouldn't it be nice if their picture wound up fitting next week's Illustration Friday topic...

Illustration Friday: Round

Looks like Cob's got his paws on the last thing he needs:

IF: Asleep

This week's Illustration Friday theme "asleep" fits with this pen-and-ink and watercolor piece I did two and a half years ago for a now defunct blog:



The blog was a short-lived project I called "Rat Manor." It was to be a journal of my days (what was really going on) as observed by rats that live behind the walls in my house (that part was fiction -- I hope). This character's name was "Cob."

It was an ambitious project. Too ambitious. I had developed several rat and mouse characters and tensions between them. I had intended to illustrate each post. It took away time from all other creative projects. My novels were gathering dust. And, as to writing about what was really going on in my life, the rats were getting awfully close to narrating scenes of me trying to come up with the next illustrated blog post. Still, it gave me a lot of material. I suppose someday, these rodents may end up in a story of their own.

Character design game

At last Thursday's #kidlitart twitter chat, illustrator Ryan Wilson suggested a fun exercise to help extend the boundaries of physical diversity in your character set. To get started, you need to dig up one of those old scraps of paper you've used to blot your watercolors on. Unfortunately all of mine have skinny brush strokes, not big, bold splotches. As I am not into drawing snake characters at the moment, I decided to cheat a little bit and create my own sheet of splotchier splotches. To do this, I simply put big dollops of water on the paper (fabriano artistico hot press in this instance) and loaded them with color. I made no effort to control how they dried. This is what it looked like:

Then with my trusty copic multiliner pens, I found faces.

I'm not sure that any of these particular faces will become future illustrations. But it was a fun exercise. It got me thinking about how asymmetrical head shapes and hairdos can be without looking too unnatural. I will probably push those sorts of things further when I design my next characters. I may try this exercise again with larger splotches that can become a character's entire figure - not just the head.

A pair of drawings in pen and ink:

Ramona in color:

Here's an inked version. I'll add color to it tomorrow.

I've been working on possible designs for a holiday card. I know it's kind of late to be getting started, but we had the entire gene pool over for Thanksgiving. I had a little trouble getting into the proper mindset.

This year Christmas will be brought to you by the newest additions to the family, my gerbils (and life models) Beezus and Ramona. Here's a preliminary sketch:


And here's Ramona. Isn't she a beauty?

Here's another from the sketchbook:
And here it is with colored pencil added:

Gerbil characters:

Rat feast redone:

Still more gerbils:

Even more gerbils:

More gerbils: