IF _ Wild

This is not yet the finished illustration, it will follow later in the day.

IF - yesterday

Yesterday this ruin might have been inhabited by knights and kings (who knows?). At closer inspection it is today's new home for flora and fauna.

Can you find the animals below?

IF - Talent

Chameleons are auch wonderful creatures and so adaptive to their environment, I just had to draw this extremely talented specimen.

IF - Talent

The talented elephant girl above is part of an outline for a logo of a shop for children's wear.
Below you can see the complete draft.

Unfortunately the shop was never opened. Also now I would do it much more abstractly, like an icon. I still like the concept, though.

IF - Wool (2)

Though I have already posted for 'wool', as you can see here, I had to do a second illustration of the topic.
Speaking about wool with my (nine-year-old) son, he came up immediately with the nice idea to show a sheep whose body is a wool skein and only its legs and head sticking out. Isn't it wonderful, how creative kids are? Though his creativity went not so far as to draw it himself. Unfortunately drawing is so not his 'thing'. He certainly did not inherit this gene from me. He is more into maths.

IF - wool

As it's still winter this chicken has dressed its eggs in cosy wool sweaters to keep them really warm.

IF - Wings

The raven above is an illustration of my book 'The Golden Hero Dragan'. In this scene the raven comes to help the hero in a desperate situation.

I am very fascinated by wings and feathers in general as you can see on my homepage.

IF - ocean

For 'ocean' I chose to show a desert which resembles an ocean in its vastness and its wave-like dunes. Even the shadows are bluish. The camel I added is called 'Wüstenschiff" in German which means desert ship, a further allusion to ocean. In consequence this camel finds a message in a bottle - right in the middle of a desert, of all places.

IF - Sky

For 'Sky' I am showing you an illustration out of my project 'The Golden Hero Dragan'. Sun and Moon have been stolen by dragons so that night has been reigning. To gain the love of the princess, Dragan decides to find them back, which of course he succeeds in.

In this double spread ( 2 x A4, i. e. 59.4 x 21 cm) you can see how he has reinstated them into the sky.

IF - fluid

For 'fluid' I show you an illustration for my book 'The Golden Hero Dragan'. It was really hard to capture the feeling of fluidness.
During the research I found so many different aspects of water like flowing water, drops, bubbles, frost patterns, waves and more that I intend to do a series of it.

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.

IF - popularity (4)

Follows part IV.
My son had a tick last year. We didn't find it immediately, so it got stuck and infested and he had to be treated with antibiotics (though I try to avoid them if possible). You can still see the spot.

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?

IF - mysterious

For this week's topic 'mysterious' I chose again an illustration for my current project of the fairy tale "Dragan The Golden Hero".

The above scene circles around a stay with the brother of the hero (who is a magic smith) during which he teaches him his arts. These arts are somewhat mysterious and may include alchemy, astronomie and healing. Hence this seemingly mysterious display of items.

IF- swell

"Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up and touch everything. If you never let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you."

E.L. Konigsburg

Reading of "swell" as the new topic let me instantly think of a blowfish. But only the quotation that came along with it gave me the idea of a blowfish who was rattling around in his small illustration (or rather the illustration is rattling around the poor fish) and then blew up because he was so scared. In this case it's actually a porcupine pufferfish which doesn't really come in red, but it just had to be this color.

IF - Midsummer Night

Though my first associations with Midsummer Nights were the nights in Scandinavia where it does not get dark at all during summer and the famous White Nights in St Petersburg, I decided for butterflies in the darkness that are flying happily around.

IF - Duet

For duet I chose these two elephants I did some time ago. They are like two different voices singing the same song.

IF - Cultivate

For this weeks topic I post a drawing of a Southern wood ant because they (like all other ants) cultivate real colonies of aphids to milk their honeydew.

Besides it is part of the current project to be shown on my homepage 40 Days - 20 Eggs:

Thinking of Easter what do you think of first (apart from easterbunnies)?

Eggs

Nicely decorated hen’s eggs or maybe even quail eggs.

Or what other eggs are there? Which animals do lay eggs at all?

You can see this on my homepage during the 40 days from Ash Wednesday till Easter:

alternately on one day you can see an egg to learn the next day whose egg that is.

Have a nice guess!

Speaking of 40 days till Easter: if you’re counting properly there are 46 days!

Has there been a mistake in counting?

No, the six sundays were ignored.

And on my homepage there’s no fasting – at least not for the eyes.