Two for Tea

Old and new artwork for Illustration Friday

Okay, right off the bat, I admit I'm cheating by submitting two illustrations for this topic, but...eh, what the heck. Other people do it, and there are so many hundreds of entries, I figure I'm making it easier by putting these on together.

This one is either from high school or college. Either way, it's old. I like to get the old stuff out where people can see it. Made from cutout scraps of magazine pages.



This bit of silliness is the best my feeble brain could come up with after being sick all weekend.

Song

New for Illustration Friday



A froggy love song, that is!

A simple necessity

Something, er, trashy, for Illustration Friday

Where I live, we are supposed to put our yard and grass clippings in specially marked trash cans. When the city started this program, I think they gave every household 2 or 3 of these stickers to put on our trash cans. You put your clippings in the can with the yellow label facing out towards the street. It's picked up by specially designated trucks and taken somewhere to be composted.


This is the sticker issued by the city.
We can use the yard waste trashcans for regular trash, too. We just need to turn the trashcan so the yellow sticker doesn't show. Most of the time, they are full of regular trash, which we seem to generate in copious amounts.


One recent trash-day morning, after a weekend of yard work and the trash truck rumbling it's way down my street, I found myself in need of another yellow sticker, and pronto. What to do? With only minutes to spare, I grabbed my acrylic paints and did this right at curbside.

So is it art? Well, I was pretty pleased with myself for coming up with the idea on short notice, so there was creativity involved. It's a nice looking leaf, if I do say so myself. And it serves its purpose. And it's simple,too, so here it is.

Just a chair

For Illustration Friday





Sometimes an empty chair speaks volumes, especially when the person who used to sit there is gone.

I bought this glider chair for my mother in law to put on her front patio. She was seriously ill, and had insomnia on top of that, and when she needed to go outside for some fresh air in the middle of the night, she could sit there, and glide gently back and forth while she tried to relax.

It is one of the few pieces of furniture we took after she died, and it immediately made itself at home on our front porch.

I do sit in it from time to time, and I also like to decorate it with different, simple accessories to match the season. I imagine Eleanor would like this picture.

The coolest blimp I ever saw!

I was cleaning up some stuff in my garage, and I had the door open for extra light and ventilation. I could hear the distinctive droning whine of a blimp. We don't get to see blimps too much here, because of the way we are situated at the base of a hill. Their flight path always seems to take them just on the other side where we can't see them.

This time, I was lucky. I could see it. And even though it was hazy and far away, I could tell this was a blimp I'd never seen before. I ran for my camera and managed to take this extremely mediochre picture. Then I searched online and found out what it is: Ameriquest Soaring Dreams
You can see better pictures of it on the website.

Update: It's one hour later, and the blimp has just come by again, going back the other way, only this time it's north of me, and closer, so the picture looks much better: