Adapting to the modern world and its technologies.

Persephone again… pretending she can stay in the Underworld with Pluton. Or she might be pretending she’s Amy Winehouse. I’m not sure which.

For Illustration Friday! 

Persephone: Keeper of the Mysteries

For Illustration Friday.

“Fashionable Clutter”: Mixed Media: china marker, pencil, ink, collage, gouache, watercolor, acrylic.

October 1994: digitally colored pen and ink drawing layered onto a scanned acrylic ground.

Routine Flight: Pen and ink on paper, scanned, digitally colored, layered on acrylic painting that was also scanned, type added digitally.

My entry for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, Routine. The text got a little squishy when compressed since the original is 2200×2200 pixels.

And one more within the same theme.

Also, the image above is a short demo of microns vs. prismacolor liners under the solvent based chartpak markers. As you can see the prismacolors hold up much better than the microns. I’ve done other tests as well with watercolor and acrylics and the prismas always come out on top.

Ah man! I totally spelled caffeine wrong. So much for the whole i before e thing. Oh wait… it’s after c. Damn. (edit: fixed it.)

So inspiration came knocking as I was drifting off to sleep last night. Illustration Friday recently ran a theme called “canned” and I caught a glimpse of the “pick of the week” for that theme: an illustration of canned fruits (which I really dig). And I thought to myself “what else can be canned that can’t really be canned?”. A strange thing to ask oneself I suppose, but I was looking for metaphor and such.

I wanted to can up intangible things. After some sketching and a fun batch of brainstorms the series of illustrations seen here is what came out.

I didn’t actually look through all the illustrations on IF for the “canned” week, so maybe this has been done. Oh well. It hasn’t been done by me. (EDIT: Okay, so I looked. There were a couple of “canned intangibles”, but none of them looked like mine. I’m kind of gald I didn’t look before because I wouldn’t have wanted to be influenced by someone else’s design. I like mine as… well mine.)

I think this is only the beginning of a bigger series and the beginning of more illustrations done in this style. When I look at them I feel good. I like what I see, so that’s going to be my motivation.

I also plan to do some large scale canvas pieces in this theme which I think will just be plain enjoyable. I only hope I can get those nice flat graphic colors right. Or maybe I will opt for some texture. Who knows? The best part will be letting it all come together in that magically organic way.

Details (because process/technique should never be kept secret): All cans were hand drawn with prismacolor fine liners then scanned into my computer and digitally colored. Want to know how I add color with the computer? Just ask and I will fill you in as best I can. Be warned, I suck at tutorials.