Yawning Cat

Here's my cat yawning. This was done some time ago.

Illustration Friday - Camouflage

Ugh! I had big plans for making this my best digital piece yet, but it all fell apart due mostly to time constraints. I tried making a plaid pattern in Photoshop but I couldn't figure out how to tile it correctly, so had to search for pictures of plaid. I ran out of time while rendering it in Photoshop and it never really came out the way I wanted it to. A lot of this has to do with the fact that I'm still learning my way around the brushes and other tools in Photoshop. I wanted to make a drop shadow but I couldn't figure out how to make the edges soft. I tried feathering it but it didn't help, so I ended up just using the airbrush tool at 30% or so to make a little bit of shadow. Will I ever learn what I'm doing with this program?

Illustration Friday - Rejection

Somehow cats seem to dislike men they don't know.

Woman

Woman's Head

This drawing was done using Char-Kole, and I'm afraid I'm a little too heavy-handed with it. I ended up switching to General's compressed charcoal which I like better, although I do like the really dark blacks I can get with Char-Kole.

Illustration Friday - Suit

King of Hearts. This is my very first piece done in Illustrator. I've had the program for a long time but never got around to playing with it, so I got the Total Training DVD for it and went through all the lessons recently. I can't remember most of it, but enough stuck that I was able to make this rudimentary illustration. After some initial frustration with the anchor points, I started to catch on and it actually became enjoyable.

Self Portrait

Here's an old self-portrait I did a decade ago. I was clearly struggling back then with proportion and distortion, although I find that all of my self-portraits are a little bit distorted when drawn from life. Check out the giraffe neck!