Illustration Friday - Perennial

It's been a while since I've had time to create an illustration for 'Illustration Friday," but when I saw that this week's word is 'Perennial,' I decided I should give it a go, especially since I just finished the big project I was working on.  Anyway, being a gardener, the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the word 'Perennial,' was flowers.  When thinking of a way to depict the word, my mind drifted to thoughts of my grandmother who, from what I've heard, was an avid gardener. She died when I was seven years old and my memories of her are vague, but I do have memories of being in her Colorado garden, or what was left of it. By the time I was born, most of her gardening days were behind her and all that was left of her garden were some of the perennials that came back every year. So this illustration, a digital watercolor created with Corel Painter 11, is a tribute to my father's mother, whose name was Augusta Desjardins. An appropriate name for a woman who loved to garden.

Illustration Friday - Artificial

This week 'Illustration Friday,' presented its participants with the word "Artificial." So many things in our world today are artificial.  We have artificial flavors, artificial flowers, artificial sweeteners, artificial grass, artificial fibers, and if you've ever been to Disneyland, you've even seen a whole menagerie of artificial animals and even artificial people. As I thought about all of these things, the first thing that popped into my head was an artificial rabbit, specifically a statue of a rabbit made from concrete.  Maybe I've had rabbits on the brain lately.  I see them almost every day in my yard and when we were in Wisconsin a few weeks ago, we were able to get up close to an unafraid little bunny (I used some of the photos I shot of him as reference for the bunny in my piece).  At the same time as I was mulling over ideas in my head, I came across a wonderful illustration from a Polish children's book. I'm sorry I don't know who the artist is, but you can see the image below. It shows a rabbit, sitting against a orangish sky amongst a group of flowers.  I love the simplicity of the composition and the graphic stylization of the rabbit and flowers.

I spent a long time working on the background, trying to get the flowers right. I was striving for something graphically elegant and simple like this Polish illustration, but my penchant for realism kept pushing me to add more shading, detail, etc. So, I ended up straying quite a ways from my inspiration.

Below you can see where I've begun working on the background.  You can also see my original sketch which I had on a separate layer.  As I went along, I decided to make the foreground darker, not only to make it a bit more dramatic, but to add some contrast to the evening sky. After I finished the image, I also decided to crop it into a more vertical format.

Here is the little bunny that we saw in Wisconsin.  We had stopped at a scenic overlook for a distant view of the "House on the Rock," and as we walked from the car to the viewpoint, we saw this tiny little guy having his evening meal. He didn't seem at all afraid of us. I was able to get within just a few feet of him for lots of picture-taking.

UPDATE: Since I posted this yesterday, I went back into my image and made a few changes.  I felt the 'real' rabbit was too light and seemed to be floating against the background so I darkened him a bit, and added a little more detail in his fur.  I also added some additional plants and grass details.  You can see the updated version on the right.

Illustration Friday - Linked

This week's Illustration Friday word is "Linked."  Once again, a lot of ideas came to mind - Links of chain tying a ship to a dock with a family of rats scurrying up the links, links in a daisy chain, a line of elephants with each elephant linking their trunks to the tail in front of them, two tigers walking side by side with their tails linked, a chain-link fence separating two friends.  But the word "linked" can also mean a bond between two things or two people.  After all, how many times have we heard the phrase "romantically linked?" I wasn't in the mood though to do something romantic.  Besides, I've been wanting to have more pictures of children in my portfolio so this led me to my final idea.  I began thinking of friendship and from there I thought about what better way to illustrate the word than to have two children, bonded by friendship, whose arms are linked as they walk their dogs.

The final art was done in Corel Painter 11.  I'm including two sketches.  The first one is a very loose, quick sketch that I did in my sketch book and then scanned.  The second sketch is a digital pencil sketch done in Painter.  This second sketch is a cleaned-up version of the first looser sketch.  It is this more refined sketch that I used as my guide to the finished art.

My Grandmother's Victorian Scrapbook

My Dad's mother, Augusta Desjardins, was born in 1878, the year that electric street lights first made their appearance in London. She died in 1962, shortly before I turned eight years old. Since she lived in Colorado, and our family lived in Southern California, we saw her only once a year, always in the summer, when my parents would pile my siblings and me into the family station wagon and we would drive to Fort Collins where she lived. With each passing year, my memories of her grow fainter. I have no recollection of what her voice sounded like or what she smelled like but I do remember her as being a quiet and gentle woman. From stories my father and my aunt told me, I know that she use to have a large flower and vegetable garden. My father told me that during the great depression, she helped earn money for the family by growing and selling seedling plants.

As a young child, I had no knowledge of what sort of life she had before my father was born in 1919, when she was 41 years old. To me she was always an old woman. At the age of seven, seeing her in her eighties, I could not imagine what she would have been like as a child.

Even now, it's hard for me to imagine her as a young woman growing up in the late Victorian era. Sitting here in the early years of the 21st century, it's hard for me to believe that I knew someone born in the 19th century.  My grandmother had two children - my father, and my father's older sister, Alvina, who is now in her early nineties.  A little over a year ago, my Aunt Alvina called to say that she was thinking of selling her house.  She asked me if I would come to Fort Collins to visit her and to go through things in her house to see if there was anything I might like.  While there, I found a scrapbook that had belonged to my grandmother, a scrapbook that she had assembled when she was a young girl in the late 19th century.  My aunt kindly said that I could have it.  I was thrilled, not only for the images that it contained, but because for the first time, I had a glimpse into what sort of things interested my grandmother Augusta (called Gussie as a child) when she was a young girl.  On the inside of the front cover there is a certificate that states she attended school for a twelve week period during the 1889-1890 school year.  She would have been eleven or twelve years old at that time, and I assume that is the age that she put together this scrapbook.

The scrapbook is filled with beautiful examples of the type of embossed and colorful images that were sold for decorative purposes during the Victorian era.  There is also a scattering of Christmas, Valentine and Easter cards.  Since this is the first week of spring, and Easter is a week from today, I thought I would post some of the beautiful floral and easter images that my grandmother added to her scrapbook over a hundred years ago.  Please excuse the poor lighting and fuzzy quality of some of these images.  As you might notice from some of the images, the paper is extremely fragile and rather than risk damaging them by putting them on my scanner, I photographed them using a handheld digital camera.  Though some of the pages are crumbling on the edges, the images themselves are very bright and colorful, making it hard to believe that they are 120 years old.