Illustration Friday: Surrender

I surrender!

I MUST do more art! It's driving me crazy not too. I'm still in love with my technical pens, but it's taking me forever to finish any pictures. I started this one over a week ago.

Skewed Sketches #8 and #9

My entertainments...finding a photo (usually in the newspaper) that has SOMETHING about it that interests me--and that usually has to do with light, or wrinkles, or expression (preferrably all three), and then make one of these "skewed sketches". Starting with something like a blind contour, and then filling in with the rendering in ink.

Joyous Girl

I guess I'm not going to get to any chickens this week for Illustration Friday. It's a shame, as I was looking forward to making a chicken picture. An actual literal chicken. They're fascinating creatures.

But in the midst of this week, totally stressing about how I'm going to send TWO kids to college next year, especially one who I don't think is ready for college, I was looking for something happy. A happy image anyway, which is silly, because working on ANY picture, even if the content is grim, makes me happy.

Skewed Sketches #6 and #7

Two more "skewed sketches." I've been doing these at school, when the kids are working on various things and the few minutes here and there when I don't have anything else I need to be doing.

Illustration Friday: Deja Vu

*******I am totally ignoring the topic this week, because I REALLY wanted to post something. This is actually the second "real" drawing for the resolutions topic--to LIVE so that when it comes time to die you won't find that you haven't lived at all. These folks are LIVING, which is what we should all be doing, all the time. Living in the moment, because this moment, NOW, is all we really have.

It's funny, though, how some moments seem like we've lived them before. There might be some kind of biological, or biochemical explanation for that feeling, but I don't remember it. It seems somehow, in my mind, tied to dreams.....

To Live #1

This is one of two of the "real" pictures for last week's Illustration Friday, the one about resolutions. It goes with this part of the poem by William Cullen Bryant:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon.....

Illustration Friday: Resolutions

This is not the picture I'm wanting to put up, but I've only begun the "real" resolution pictures, and this is a little doodle I did in the meantime.

Here are a couple quotes worthy of resolutions:

Thoreau, who "went to the woods because [he] wanted to live deep and suck the marrow out of life, to put to rout all that was not life, and not, when [he] had come to die, discover that [he] had not lived."

and William Cullens Bryant in his poem "Thanatopsis":

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon....

I can deal with resolutions like that.