illustration friday, beard and day 38!

So when I heard that this week's illustration Friday's topic was beard, I thought it sounded like a fun one. aaaannnnd, I thought it could serve as day 38 in my 40 days of lettering project! I was determined not to spend a lot of time on it and more importantly, NOT to do my usual, scan, redraw with the pen tool routine in AI. Too tedious and would have taken way too much time. I figured this kinda lent itself to more of a woodcut, rough look anyway. Broke out the Tombow brush pen I heard so many people rave about and went about my business. I did retrace my initial pencil, in pencil, to get a better idea of spacing and letter widths but I tried not to get too fussy, and this was the result!

happy summer!

In honor of the longest day of the year, I did this little piece that also serves as day 37 of my 40 days of lettering project. My dad was born on this day and was always kinda proud of that little fact, do this one is for him :). I wanted to see if I could do this in under an hour, but I failed...took more like and hour and a half. I spent a little too much time messing with texture and brushes, oh well. But as luck would have it, I just realized that the illustration friday theme of the week is summer, so there ya go!

Hope it is as beautiful wherever you are as it is here in New England today!

illustration friday... voyage

confession time... I actually took this little guy from an older piece and put him in a setting. When I heard the word of the week, I thought he would work pretty well and I hadn't submitted anything over there for quite a while, so what the heck ;) Can you actually cheat at illustration Friday?! shhhhh...

40 days of lettering, day 28 and killing 3 birds with one stone

also available in my shop!

This is what you call art multitasking. I hadn't done an Illustration Friday prompt in some time, so I thought maybe I could combine a submission, along with checking off day 28 of my lettering project, as well as come up with a valentine product for over at my society6 ;). Hey, when you work for yourself, this is the kind of crazy assignments you can self concoct. The word for the week at illustration friday, was beginning. More often than not, when I do submit something over there, I do it as lettering. I had kinda missed doing something on the cute lettering side (a departure from some of the quotes I have been doing for creative interviews). Soooo, I came up with this quote which is a bit of a reluctant valentine, one for someone who is on the fence about revealing their true feelings, ha. I think there must be a market for this sentiment, at least with teenagers!

illustration friday... mustache

I hadn't submitted one of these in a long time, but when I saw the fun subject matter, mustaches, I knew I had an old illustration I could easily revise a bit to use! Actually, I did this for a Groundhog Day card a while back, so I removed him, changed the pose a bit, added some more textures that I thought it lacked, and here you go. Of course, you can't have a monocle, beard and mustache without a pipe! ;) Happy Wednesday!

illustration friday... together, plus day 8 of 40 days of lettering

That's right, I'm killing two birds with one stone. I hadn't done an illustration Friday topic for a couple months. When I saw this week's word, it seemed simple enough to treat it as lettering (which is often my fallback approach to these). I struggled a lot with this lettering, color-wise, treatment, etc. I'm still not sure I like it, but I was well over my self imposed time limit of an hour, so I called it done. Not sure why I ended up with another circular design, but I do like that it is a bit looser than some of the lettering I had been doing. Happy weekend!!

Is your life a circus?

I've been taking a look at some of my work and wondering what I could do to make it more salable. I had done this piece below a while back for illustration friday.

The word was "tension." I liked how it turned out but thought perhaps I could do another version with type that would make it more wall art worthy and maybe useable for an office, haha?! I also decided that despite how much I love pink, nixing that color in lieu of a tan/beige would make it more gender neutral. Look for both over on my shop at Society6 (shameless self promo time :)

I would love to expand on this circus theme... so many fun possibilities!

Enjoy your Labor Day weekend, folks!

illustration friday... robot!!

Heyyy, so I haven't done one of these in quite a while, but who could resist this subject? I decided to try to girly it up a bit because girls can like robots, right? Maybe that's a niche market that needs to be explored... hmmmm ;)

illustration friday... children

Ok, so another week with an awesome theme that I absolutely love and no time to do something new...argh!!! Watch...  when I do have time it will be some word like blood or gore, lol. Anyway, this was a  rejected concept for a unicef holiday card. Being a Disney/ Small World addict and Mary Blair freak, it was fun to work on! 

illustration friday... sweet

Not much time this week to work on something new for this topic, so I dug up and revised and oldie but hopefully still a goodie. How could I resist doing something for one of my favorite words? ;)