Pattern

Intricate

This "Ornate Room" is just a pencil doodle, but I thought it fitting for this week's topic!

Canned Flowers?

I made this illustration for a poster for a can recycling contest a couple years ago. It's a recycled art piece, with real can tabs on a pastel sketch. I haven't participated on the IF site for many months, so in the spirit of getting back into it I perused the site today and was inspired to post this existing image last minute. I've decided to at least visit IF every week even if I don't post anything myself. Just seeing what everyone else comes up with is greatly inspiring!

Here is the poster. It shows up pretty bright here but was printed on a flecked gray recycled sheet so the colors were still bright but richer:

Jell's Garden

Acrylic and found items on canvas board

My first recycled art piece! To all who visit, despite the lack of a thumbnail on Illustration Friday, THANK YOU!!

Leap

It must be so nerve-wracking, that first time out of the nest!

This is a sketch for a very simple animation I plan to create. Thanks to Claudine Hellmuth, who posted an animation to IF for this topic, for the inspiration to give it a go! Unfortunately it won't be ready in time to post, so the initial sketch will have to do for now.

Multiple

I had big plans to paint a pineapple for this week's IF topic, but the weekend didn't go as planned. So I sketched a couple things this evening, one of a photo of hummingbird nest with multiple eggs which I took last month, the other of a photo of fresh figs I took last summer.

Both pineapple and figs are what are known as "multiple fruit," meaning they form from a cluster of flowers. The fruit from each flower grows together into one giant fruit, giving us the pineapple and the fig. Cool, eh? I'd never have known that if I hadn't looked up "multiple" on Dictionary.com. Not only does IF give us a good excuse to illustrate, we learn from it too!

Both sketches I attempted to keep very loose because I tend to get too caught up in detail, so I feel pretty good about these sketches. Happy drawing everyone! And sorry about the crummy photo quality.

Theory -- Birds Are Good Omens

I have a theory which developed fifteen years ago when I lay ill in a little stone room in Nepal, alone and fretting about my situation. A little bird alighted on the windowsill outside. It looked at me and stayed there for a long time and for some reason I suddenly felt as if everything would be ok. Since then I've had similar experiences, deep worry met with a little winged visitor who lands a little too closely to me, looks at me just so, and lingers nearby just a little too long. Sometimes it even chirps. And each time, the thing I was worried about has worked out ok. So I have this theory that birds are messengers, sent to us as a good omen, or to let us know we're not alone.



Acrylic on canvas board, 7"x5"