Month of Love - Lost in Translation

This week's challenge for Month of Love was Lost in Translation.

Looking for love in the all the wrong inanimate objects...

I like the sketchbook page I did for this a lot:

Tudor Safari

This month I've been watching lots of historical dramas and my favorite part is all the incredible costumes and sets. It inspired me to do a few small paintings to fill an empty demo board book I had left over from the semester. At first I just started a drawing of an elephant in Elizabethan garb, when I realized there was a pun at hand, and Elizaphant I was created. Followed by Hyenra VIII, Meery I and Elkward VI, the whole Tudor clan. They were then placed in the book in chronological order of coronation.

Month of Love - Favorite Love Story

Another week, another Month of Love piece! This week's theme was Favorite Love Story...

I guess 'favorite' and 'love story' might not be the best words to describe to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. It's more like most unforgettable heartbreak of my young life. The books definitely do not qualify as love stories but for some reason the way they ended really stuck with me. I was also probably very jealous that people's souls were animals who hung around their person, talking with them and being their closest friends.

Paper Dogs

These were some paper doll-dogs I made for a friends birthday card. Our favorite puppies are corgis and pugs, so it was incredibly fun and adorable to make.

Month of Fear - What Lives Under Your Bed?

Our first challenge for the Month of Fear was What Lives Under Your Bed? I went with a variety of different whos and whats, this was my end result.

Worth clicking to check out a larger version.

Birthday Birds

Not only was Sunday Father's Day, a week ago was my father's birthday so there was quite a bit of dad celebrating to do. For those of you who don't know my father, he is an excellent musician, fantastic furniture maker and quite the technical illustrator. And none of those are even his day job. But his job does intersect with one of his oldest hobbies - birdwatching. So it was a natural choice to make they contents of his birthday card avian.

Here's a lovely sketch.

And the final painting.

Mr. Mole

I posted about this piece a while back but this was before I had nice pictures of the finish. This is a tunnel book about the opening scene of Wind in the Willows when Mr. Mole becomes fed up with his underground life and decides to leave his mole hole. I finally got a chance to take nice photographs and here they are:

The Wind in the Willows

A little while ago I was exploring Netflix and I found the old stop-motion animation Wind in the Willows program that we for some reason had taped on VHS that I would just watch on repeat when I was a kid. You know, this one:

And I remembered just how much I had loved the Wind in the Willows story so I sat down that afternoon and read the whole book. Suddenly, I realized, I should be doing drawings based on the story. And not just drawings...tunnel books. So I began the process of sketching out a tunnel book from the first paragraph:

"The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said 'Bother!' and 'O blow!' and also 'Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gavelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, 'Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow." 

Mr. Mole preliminary sketches

Tunnel Book Sketch

A few water colors and a few cut up fingers later, construction began.

And this is pretty much it.

I want to make a series of these so I can make a little star book out of them. There will be more better pictures to follow but I can't photograph the piece....until it gets back from the show it's in! I will post more about the show soon.

Some Sketchbook Pages

Both are crayon resists done with watercolor and some pencil.

Ever since I came home for the summer I haven't had a scanner and it makes recording my work a lot harder. These were done with a camera so they're a bit fuzzy but get the idea across.