Run Rabbit Run

Over the wall with ye, Little Rabbit..

Amanda F. came by last night and we had an enjoyable time of eating chips and drawing an image for this weeks illustration friday word, which is 'prepare'.  Apparently, this bird is preparing for some sort of fight or battle.  Not sure why he is dressed as a clown.  Clown fight maybe?  I'd pay to see that.

I am indebted to Amanda for the suggestion of chevron pants for the bird clown.
So dynamic and stylish! 

Question: Why must all my bird people be brandishing swords and knives, or, as I like to call them, shivs?

My partner B and I have a table in the living room that used to be my grandfather's.  It has a hinged glass top and we use it to display our considerable collection of... stuff?  Childhood memorabilia?  Things from outside?
Anyway, B has this mouse that he has kept in a sucrets tin for many many years.  The mouse was never alive at any point in their relationship, I feel compelled to add.  So B found this mouse when his family lived on a farm; it was long dead, and had dried out so much that all that remained of it was an almost complete skeleton and a partial covering of delicate mouse leather.  It died in a rather elegant position, which B has maintained by carefully protecting it in the aforementioned tin.  And one day I drew it.  So many tiny ribs and vertebrae, what a pleasure..

I am very excited to see this movie!  Puppetvision is an excellent and one of a kind puppetry blog created by Andrew Young.   He has taken his puppet info gathering skills to the next level with  Puppetvision: The Movie, a documentary about, what else, puppets!!  If you are at all interested in puppets, you will want to check out the movie teaser below; the film will be illuminating what is going on around the world in puppetry today, and exploring puppetry as an art form. 

Puppetvision is being funded in part by Indiegogo, if you would like to contribute to the funding of this movie go here.

Happy New Year!  Above you will see some ruffly tissue and paper forms that are destined to become pinatas.  I had the pleasure to work with the company Rethink this past November making holiday pinatas for their website holiday card.  They were a bit untraditional though, for pinatas anyway, as they were in the shapes of a burnt turkey, the inlaws, a fruitcake and a parking meter.  They were great fun to make.  You can check them out at the Rethink website or just look below...  My favourite is the poor fruitcake, he takes a cane to the eye and all his guts/candy spill out of his face.  Tsk tsk.

A little drawing with a 3d papier mache cat head. 

'Terrrrroooooooop! Terrrrrrrooooop!' or whatever sound it is that elephants make...

The cat family sketch redrawn and coloured in photoshop...
I kind of wish I had a dress like the older sister has on...

This is a quick little drawing of an image that has been percolating in my mind for quite some time.  I have been wanting to create this scene of a cat family posed portrait with puppets but haven't quite figured out how yet.  So why not draw it?  The original idea was to have a mother and two daughters, but for this one we have the classic mother, father, older sister and younger brother, who is definitely not happy to be there.  The girl is though.  She's a darling angel.  Her parents must be proud.
Why does only the mother have whiskers?  I don't know.  Maybe the children are too young and the father shaved his off.

Generally, when drawing an illustration, I keep the line work controlled and neat, because I like the way it looks when I draw that way; also, I can control the addition of colour more easily.  However, I also really like the way some of my sketches turn out and not wanting to finesse them into a tidy drawing, leave them as is.  This in turn means that if I colour it digitally I am leaving quite a bit of it up to chance, and whether I closed in an area or not. 
Fun!