Octopus

Something Under the Sea for Illustration Friday



Created with Art Rage and Photoshop.
(Still playing with the "spotted look" from a couple weeks ago.)

robots - a photoset on Flickr

This week's Illustration Friday theme is Robot. Although I have played around with a couple of ideas, I didn't come up with anything I felt like submitting. It didn't stop me from looking at everybody else's submissions, and I think I've hit the jackpot with this! robots - a photoset on Flickr

Purple Cactus

I had so much fun doing the gecko picture, I decided to do a similar one of a purple cactus. Last week on our trip, I saw a bunch of these in peoples' yards, and was fascinated by them. Apparently they are native to Arizona, and a popular landscape cactus in Borrego Springs.







Here are some shots of an actual purple cactus. I think the common name is Santa Rita.

In my wanderings around our motel, (looking for bugs, etc.) I came upon a mangled and mostly dead purple cactus in the front yard of a property whose house had burned down. (I thought I had taken a picture of it, but I can't find it, so maybe I didn't.) Anyway, I managed to get a single pad that didn't look completely dead, and I brought it home. Maybe it will survive and grow for me.

Gecko

New spotted artwork for Illustration Friday.


In this case, spotted describes the execution of the illustration rather than the subject itself. I was inspired by native Australian Aboriginal paintings, which often feature nature and animals, and have lots of spots (or dots?) in the spaces.

I created this image in Art Rage.

Additional inspiration for this illustration comes from my new friend, Stanley.


Update: I had so much fun making this illustration, I just made another one in a similar, spotted style. You can see it here, if you want.

Slideshow!

Nature is art.
For me anyway. It excites and inspires me. And the desert is one of my favorite kinds of nature. These photos were taken last week during our trip to Anza Borrego Desert State Park.

Pictures by Jerry, Brice, and myself. Between the three of us, we must have taken about 700 pictures. That's a lot to sort through and organize. But here is a small sample:


This is Truckhaven Rocks. Most of the pictures were taken along the trail we hiked to reach them.












I have a "thing" for gnarled branches.







There was a whole world of miniature scenery. This canyon was just inches high.



Critter hole, with entryway and landscaping.



This almost looks like an aerial view of something much bigger, but it's actually just a few inches high.


So was this tree!


Then there was this pink hill, whose face was a slope of crumbling sandstone blobs:







A single blob close up.



Around the corner from the blobby stuff, there were more pink rocks with rippled layers.


An unusual rock



Can you see the monkey's face?


Canyon walls:








Flowers:








Misc.





Who's that hiker?

Springtime ambivalence

I'm feeling extra blah towards the spring holidays this year. Easter is coming soon. So is Passover. Not that I have really been paying attention. Since Eleanor passed away, we don't really "do" Easter any more. And we never really "did" Passover in the first place. In fact, I'm not even sure when it starts this year. (And this is the religion of my heritage. ) And the worst part (?) is I don't really care.

William's Flower Garden

This is another old springtime favorite. It was inspired by a trip to the Huntington Gardens. Even though I had a bad cold and it was raining, I would follow you-know-who anywhere like the lovesick doggie that I was. And look, I still have something to show for it.

This is a woodblock print. It had several parts to it, and was very hard to do. I only made a handful of proofs, the nicest one of which I gave to my dad. The garden that this is based on is called the Shakespeare Garden. My dad's name is William. So I called this print William's Flower Garden and gave him the best proof.

In the springtime of my youth...

These are some old pictures I painted of a flowering pear tree in my yard when I was a kid. The tree is still there.(Sorry, my parents had the tree removed in December 2007)



I was maybe 15-ish when I did this one. The original is badly discolored. I tried to clean it up in Photoshop, and the flowers are not supposed to be so dark, but oh well...




This is the same tree, from a few years later. Again, the paper looks really bad after 30-some-odd years, so I put it in my art machine, and....


Look how nifty! Of course, it's not the same as the original, and I can't even say it's better. But I like it.

Evolution

I can feel that the way I use this blog may be changing, just a little bit.

For one thing, I have started to become dissolusioned with Illustration Friday. It's been almost a year since I found it. There were two or three hundred people participating at the time. It has been growing steadily since then, and now there are more than a thousand. Of course, in that number are people who double and even triple post, people who post their kids' art, and people who post ...can I say it?....really crappy art. If you can even call it art. Anyway, it's just gotten too big and too ponderous to really enjoy.

Oh, and another thing: even though the guidelines say you can post old artwork if it fits the theme, there are some art snobs who think that it's pointless to post something old, and what we really should do is crank out something new every week. I thought the idea was just to share our art.

So anyway, I'm not abandoning IF entirely, but I probably won't be participating as much as I used to. At least not until they make some improvements. What I hope to be doing here is posting some more of my older art, what little new stuff I can manage, and maybe some photos of things that catch my eye or my imagination.