Illustration Friday: Fail

This week's IF topic, "Fail" immediately made me think of the news about airlines going out of business while one airline flying their planes without proper inspections. Here's my take on a rather heavy topic...hope your week is taking off!

Illustration Friday: Save

Here's an old illustration I did that happened to fit the IF topic, "Save". This post is coming in very close to the deadline since I had trouble logging onto Blogger earlier in the week, and couldn't get the chance to get this post up until now...

Sketchcrawl: Balboa Park

Here are some sketches from 18th Worldwide Sketchcrawl - L.A. version. This time we were at Balboa Park in Van Nuys, with hopes of catching a glimpse of cherry blossoms...alas, most flowers were gone, and it was an unseasonally chilly, overcast day. It was still nice to spend a relaxing time in nature.


People BBQing:



















Lake Balboa - (note the tiny patch of pink cherry blossoms still left on the tree):

























Little red-haired girl feeding the ducks:


























People on the pedal boat:


















By the way, I haven't figured out how to lay out multiple images on Blogger posts so that images consistently show right after the text. If pictures and captions don't look like they match when you're browsing this post, now you know why. Do you know how to fixt this? If anyone who's reading this can help me out, I'd greatly appreciate it!!

Illustration Friday: Homage

This is my homage to John Singer Sargent. He was an amazing painter who captured the light and likeness with swift, confident strokes. Having a great painting as a reference (this is based on the portrait of Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler) made the process of making this study very enjoyable.

He painted with oils and I'm painting here with Photoshop...mostly because I was never good at handling oils, and I'd like to practice painting digitally more. I didn't scan anything and didn't use any effects, just placed colors with brush and paintbucket and an occasional smudge tool, to get the immediate, fresh "painterly" quality.

Not too shabby for my first effort at digital portraiture...it's flawed when I compare this to digital illustrators who work in this mode exclusively (my favorite is Steve James at http://www.fridayeve.com/wordpress/ - I found him through Illustration Friday!), it was still fun and I'm discovering that my tendencies for flat, graphic shapes is showing up even here.

Illustration Friday: Pet Peeves

I definitely hate the sound of screeching fingernails on the chalkboard, so that would be my entry for this week's IF topic, "Pet Peeves". This is also my editorial illustration take on the financial crisis that education system is facing in my home state of California.

Illustration Friday: Heavy

This week went by fast - it was "heavy" in terms of scheduling and attending lots of activities for me. Before I forget and miss the deadline for this week's IF topic, "Heavy", here it is!

I thumbnailed a lot for this one...the topic steered my drawings to darker, less whimsical direction. That's usually OK with me, though I finally settled on this idea of "getting on the ball" as a positive reminder to myself.

Illustration Friday: Garden

Clocks "spring forward" an hour ahead as of this weekend, and we have more daylight. I created this pattern to celebrate the season and to match this week's IF topic, "Garden".