IF - Tribute

Much to my regret I learned that Penelope Dullaghan is not attending to Illustration Friday any more. I think she did a great job in launching this blog and thereby giving us all the opportunity to have fun in illustrating an issue every week. I especially enjoyed the quotations she gave along with them in her newsletter. Through posting and following other entries I also met some very interesting people I would be very sad to have missed. Knowing Thomas James from past times of Escape From Illustration Island (which was another favourite of mine) I am sure he will give this blog as much inspiration as Penelope before.

As a tribute to Penelope I experimented with this illustration. The rose itself was done for a Valentines's card some time ago. I have now added a texture as the 'pure' rose seemed somewhat 'naked' to me. As I have never worked with textures before, I am still in the process of learning how much is appropriate.

IF - egg

This egg comes as a surprise: whenever one has cracked, another is appearing inside. Will the purple one be the last?
I have always been intrigued by Russian matryoshka dolls, so I simply had to make my Easter egg working after the same principle.

I also made some yummy Easter cookies including egg-shaped ones, which you can see here:

Everything just had to be some shade of green to at least feel a touch of spring inside the house because guess what I saw when I raised my shutters on Saturday?

That's a view you'd expect on Christmas, not on Easter. I hope that at least some of you have enjoyed a more spring-like Easter.

IF - Swim

This lazy little gnome is sort of a double feature as he enjoys swimming in a bubble while also wearing eye glasses.

On second thought I added some more colour to the water.

Which do you prefer?

I love garden gnomes (Though NOT in the garden!) and have already added one to an illustration for 'Heimat' (the English 'home' is not exactly the same) as it is one of many kitsch items representing Heimat for me.You can see it here:

On researching garden gnomes I stumbled upon this hilarious book: How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack. 

IF - New

Let's see what is in store for us in 2013. Hoping for the best I have wrapped it in gold.

I had a very hard time with some new paper I used for this drawing. Eventually wanting to draw on high quality paper, I bought some at the local art supplier. They refused to sell single sheets to try it out. Unfortunately it turned out to be slippery and grainy at the same time. While slipping off its awful surface, I couldn't get the drawing as smooth as I normally work. Well, I certainly won't take it again. Which leaves me with 99 pages of very expensive waste paper, unless I find some other purpose for it.

Wish you all a happy, healthy and eventful New Year.

IF - Glow

The entry for this weeks topic 'glow' is also part of my current Advents Calendar.

It shows the four candles for the four Sundays before Christmas. While looking for inspiration for this illustration I found several Advent wreaths with three purple candles (Did you know that purple opposite to violet is a non-spectral colour together with grey?) and one in pink. Becoming curious whether there is a purpose behind this colour scheme, I deciced to look it up in Wikipedia. And there actually is no topic you cannot learn anything new about. In this case I found out that the lithurgic colour for the time of Advent is purple. As the third Sunday is called 'Gaudete' (rejoice) the candle for this day is pink, considered to be a happier shade of purple.

For me one of the best things in illustration (apart from inventing and drawing) is looking up on issues and discovering so many interesting news even about the most ordinary topics.

Have a wonderful Christmas time!

IF - Snow

Finally here comes my last entry for 'snow'. Of course it's also part of my Advents Calendar.

As you can see, the ilustrations have simplified, with the nearly realistic snow cristal, the partly realistic snowman (though this hardly shows after scanning) and this almost abstract rendering of a for tree. Which one do you like best?

Wish you all a wonderful Christmas time.

IF - Snow

Here is yet another one of the Postcards for my Advents Calendar. It illustrates 'Leise reiselt der Schnee'.

IF - Snow

For the current topic 'snow' you can see the most recent entry of this year's advent's calendar on my homepage.

It 's such a nice coincidence (though pretty obvious, too, considering the season) that I wanted to do this illustration for the old German Christmas song ' Schneeflöckchen, Weißröckchen'. The calendar presents different old German Christmas Songs every day with the lyrics underlying the illustration.

Unfortunately all snow we had last week melted away, with no prospects for snow on Christmas either. Let's hope for the weather forcast to be wrong and enjoy a white Christmas.

IF - mirror

The entry for this weeks topic 'mirror' is my first one for ages. Hope you like it.

It's not done in my usual realistic style in color pencil, but entirely on the computer as you can tell. I saw these watch towers (that have been out of use for years) when I was on an island in the North Sea last winter.

IF - popularity (7)

Moles are more intelligent than man. When we had one in our garden, we tried all the popular means of scaring it away: nothing worked. As in Germany they are a protected species (I am at a loss why because almost every meadow I see around here seems to be riddled with molehills), so you mustn't kill them. Anway, to protect our precious lawn, we tried the ultimate solution and installed a mole-trap (You can buy them in spite of the ban to kill moles. How crazy is that?). The mole must have laughed out loud at us by then because, guess what? It  just dug a new burrow around the trap!

IF - popularity (6)

The last winter was so hard with masses of snow for weeks that voles came into my garden and ate virtually every single bulb they could find. And I had masses of them as spring flowers are my favourites, especially tulips. I had them in so many different colours and varieties including parrot tulips. In my garden plants are grouped by colours: shades of white in one flower bed, shades of pale pink over bright pink to dark red in another one and shades of blue and purple in yet another one. In between some greenish yellow of alchemilla. Anyway this year I didn't dare to plant new bulbs because of the voles which, once they had discovered my garden, continued to come throughout the year.
When I googled them to better know what they looked like I was completely surprized to see that they are no bigger than an ordinary mouse. Somehow by the extent of damage they had done, I had imagined them to be closer to rats.

IF - popularity (5)

In my first garden I proudly planted some dahlias which had such a wonderful colour and were full of blossoms, only to come out the next morning not finding anything left but the naked stems. By then I had never seen slugs and when I discovered how tiny these voracious monsters are... Arghh!
Fortunately this is not the season to deal with slugs and I hope the summer won't be so humid that they'll become a plague.

Valentine's Day 2012 (2)

On second thought I changed the Valentine's Day card by eliminating the hands. I guess you wouldn't understand it without kowing my last post for IF. Which version do you prefer?

Valentine's Day 2012

I was eager to do something for Valentine's Day, but no idea was really convincing. The last post for IF (suspense), though, inspired me to do a heart of toy stones for Valentine's Day with the most important 'ingredients' for love written on them. As there are always two people contributing to a happy love you can see two hands who built this heart together.

IF - forward

This forward moving horse is one of my illustrations for the fairy tale 'The Golden Hero Dragan', the original running into the opposite direction.

Instinctively I thought that forward would usually mean to go from left to right (though in the above mentioned book it works the other way round). That left me wondering why this should be so. Does it depend on the writing direction one is accustomed to which in Latin writing goes from left to right? Does that mean on the other hand that people who are writing right-to-left (as with Hebrew and Arabian) or not only right-to-left but top-to-bottom (as with some Asian scripts) read this illustration differently? So maybe illustration is not globally readable after all?

Poster for a work group at school

At the primary school my son attends, parents were asked to give work groups on a 'Parents Project Day' on whichever topic they would like to. I volunteered to read 'The Gruffalo' in English (and German of course, as the kids have only just begun to learn the language) which is a story I admire very much. Besides I love reading to children. There is hardly a day when I don't read to my son and we discuss about the heard.

Anyway, in the work group I intend to hide any illustration of the Gruffalo itself from them and read till the moment before the mouse discovers its imagined monster to be real because I want the children to draw a monster of their own imagination with the given information. Afterwards we will of course go on with the story and the Gruffalo in the book will be revealed. I hope this concept will work. Especially so as I have never done such a work group before.

As there are 12 work groups, the children will have to chose which of them they are interested in. So every teaching parent had to create a poster to describe what one's work group is about. It had to show as few words as possible because some of the kids are not yet very accomplished readers. I had the idea of a forest with the information on a log pile and symbols for all the vital info.

IF - grounded

Grounded again - the first post for IF for quite a while now.

It shows a pylon standing in water that is standing about 50 m from our house. Right now the river I'm living at (which normally can't be seen from our house) has flooded all the adjoining grassland so that it looks as if we were living at a big lake. I love this sight! Fortunately our house is built on a much higher level so that there's no risk of water in the basement. The pylon itself is built on a concrete base that emerges about 2 m above ground - under normal conditions, that is.

IF - hibernating

 

The first thing that came to my mind for 'hibernating' was a polar bear, just because I love them. But apart from the fact that I don't think polar bears are hibernating at all (living in the everlasting winter of the Arctic), this seemed to 'wintery' an interpretation for the present season. So instead I chose some fruit and seeds people and animals are gathering for winter. And of course some fallen leaves, too.

The night sky is again part of my project 'The Golden Hero Dragan', all the other items have already appeared in a different context. I newly arranged them to fit this topic.

As you may have noticed, I have been kind of hibernating myself recently because of my current project of the fairy tale. It turned out to be more time-consuming as I assumed it to be, and I am afraid this may last a bit more. So I hope you will be patient with my hibernating and look forward to the finished book which, of course, I will show to you here on my blog.