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 - Farewell

This time I think the illustration says it all, there is no need to add any elaborate written add-on.
Suffice it to say: Farewell to you, my illustrations and may you be welcomed warmly to the world of books.

IF - Talent

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

IF - Storm

Happy Valentine!
This time I did a combination of storm and a love motif for Valentine's Day. I think it's not too far fetched, as true love will carry you through many storms ...

In my new blog '99 Sheets Of White Paper' you can see another small Valentine's item. Just have a look here, if you are curious.

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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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?

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.