Category: IF

Click on the thumbnail for a closer look.

A quick submission for this week’s Illustration Friday theme. This is something I did awhile back. I’ve been enjoying the roadside weeds this week — especially the masses of tall, leggy weeds with tiny little purple flowers.

No time for a new Friday Illustration this week, but I wanted to send something. I did this for a band fundraiser auction a couple of years ago. The counters in the word “music” were cut away to reveal paste-painted paper behind.

The Friday Illustration theme this week is “Broken.” I think this John Stuart Mill quotation is on topic. Before anyone asks, this week it’s not doubling as a bookmark 🙂 … But it could, couldn’t it? Hmmm. The original is about 2″ x 8″, white ink and colored pencils on black charcoal paper. (Click twice to see the scan at full size.)

“We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and stare up at them and wonder about whether they was made or only just happened.”
— from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Click on the thumbnail for a closer look. I’m afraid this is one that looks better in person than on screen. For one thing, the white letters in the sky are readable in real life.

I don’t draw. Okay, I used to not draw. This was more painful to do than I expected, but also satisfying to have accomplished. A baby step, but still a step.

Each Friday, the folks at Illustration Friday website propose a theme for illustration. And for the past two weeks I’ve enjoyed clicking through the 150+ artists who each contribute by illustrating on the topic and then linking back to the theme page at Illustration Friday.

What a variety of responses! It’s fascinating to page through them all.

My first submission to Illustration Friday is an artist book I did nearly 4 years ago. Click on the thumbnail above for a larger look. The text, an anonymous quotation, reads: “Man, despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and many accomplishments, owes the fact of his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”

I used this same text in the broadside done last month and uploaded to this blog on August 20.