Illustration Friday - Visitors

I hate this kind of visitor!

Portrait Party - Kerstin

Here's a portrait I did for the fun blog The Portrait Party. The idea is for two people to get together and draw each other, then post the results on the Portrait Party blog site. It's really fun to see all the different interpretations and styles!

This was my first one, and I used pen with no preliminary drawing, so I ended up making Kerstin's mouth a little too big. I scanned it and colored it in Photoshop.

Thanks Kerstin!

Cat

Here's another pen and ink of my cat I did a while ago. She has strange pop-eyes.

Onion

Charcoal and Pastel

Male Nude Figure

This model was a dancer with an amazing figure and interesting poses. He only posed a couple of times for our group.

Illustration Friday - Captain

This illustration was inspired by a short story called "Benito Cereno" by Herman Melville. He was the captain of a troubled sailing ship that another ship approached to help. Cereno was a really mysterious figure and the captain who came to help him couldn't figure out what was going on. The imagery that Melville comes up with is really memorable, this story and "Bartleby" are two of my favorite short stories by Melville that I've read in the last couple of years.

This was done in Painter. The hat wasn't very successful but I just couldn't find a good close-up picture of a pirate's hat for reference and so had fudge it.

Illustration Friday - Emergency

I went for a more painterly approach this time.

Cat

Another pen and ink drawing of my cat, done from a photo.

Illustration Friday - Missing

This idea popped into my head as soon as I saw this week's topic. At first I was going to make a landscape for the puzzle, but then I thought about the Mona Lisa, and how everybody always talks about her enigmatic smile. How appropriate to have a missing puzzle piece be that very smile!

I also learned something about Photoshop this time, since I hadn't known there were extra textures that could be loaded from the presets, so now I know!

Illustration Friday - Moon

The sun is always portrayed as happy, so I thought I'd make the moon with a slightly more mischievous look.

Figure