Illustration Friday: ahead

My entry for Illustration Friday, this week's topic, "ahead":

(soft pastel on black paper, A4)

So what lies ahead?

Freehand drawn with a couple of shadow/tunnel pictures for reference, then I fixed the colour levels a little in Photoshop (the original is slightly faded because of the wonders of fixative). Feels good to do another dark and moody piece...

On a side note, my previous two pastel drawings came out crappy to not-so-crappy. I now know that this is partly because of a piece of white blackboard chalk that somehow made its way into my pastel set, and I couldn't tell the difference between it and the pastels as I rarely use pastels. The piece of chalk now sits in my bin.

Happy birthday Kinga

I wanted to do something nice for Kinga's birthday, because when I last saw her she was stressing out about all manner of things. I'm not the best portrait artist in the world, so what better gift to give than a portrait? :P

For Kinga Bee :)

(graphite on paper, A4)

My first attempt at drawing her was in charcoal and looked like a different person. This one looks more like her so I settled for this one. She said I made her look prettier than in real life... uhm, no that's not possible ;)

I didn't need her permission to post this but I did get her approval. Besides, I'd prefer that she was happy with it and plant a big kiss on my lips than be angry and slap me.

And just so there's no sense of embarrassment, here's a self-portrait that I did in college when I was around 16-17, in acrylic, when I was just starting out in acrylics and even worse at portraits.

Why do I look angry? I dunno, maybe because this was frustrating to paint, especially with cheap student-grade acrylics that were like painting with water. Or it's most likely the angle of the paper distorting my face. The best thing about this self-portrait is the jacket, heh.

Visit Kinga's art blog here.

Illustration Friday: detective

My entry for Illustration Friday (it's been a while), this week's topic, "detective":

(graphite on paper)

He's a detective, or "private eye"... get it?

I'm pretty sure I'm not the first ever person to discover this play on words but hey, an eyeball in a hat and trenchcoat looks spiffy, and much less offensive to draw than a private dick.

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Update 26/03/2013: My illustration has been used on the cover of an ebook! Check the related blog post for more information.

The missing link

IF has been really uninspiring these past few weeks. I had an idea for "rescue" but I decided not to do it because I had a feeling that I'd seen a very similar picture in a previous IF. Anyway, getting back on topic, because boredom can make me do some weird things here's my quick little tribute to the current internet phenomenon, Standing Cat:

Kalabaw

"Moo"? More like "..."

(acrylic on paper, A3)

This took a bit longer to finish than I'd expected, mostly because I thought I'd messed it up and didn't have the enthusiasm to fix it. But I did fix it, sort of.

And seeing as it's always nice to have some work-in-progress pics, here's a couple of work-in-progress pics. There would have been more but I got carried away with destroying and recovering the painting to take any more :)

 Click here for some more kalabaw-related goodness :)