IF - Return

This week's Illustration Friday topic is Return.  Serge and his family hurried to return home after a hard day in the fields.  Drawn and painted on my iPad.

Illustration Friday -Swamp

This week's Illustration Friday topic is "Swamp.  Herbert was a swamp dweller, but this evening he couldn't find any of his friends.

This was drawn and painted on the IPad using OmniSketch and ArtRage.

Ellifolks_too - New Zazzle Shop

I found the Zazzle shop recently and decided to open a store there and put some in some products with my drawings on them. It's been a lot of fun so far. So far, I have some cards, mug, a baby's onesie, Keds shoes, and a skateboard.

If you'd like to take a look, you can visit my Ellifolks_too Zazzle shop here.

Illustration Friday - "We're Similar!"

The Illustration Friday  topic this week is "similar".  It  made me think of how people can tend to avoid others who are different from them.

"We're Similar!" is inspired by memories of the way the social system at grade school worked when I was little (still does?), and how children who were different in some way or didn't have clothes that were as nice as the others were ostracized.

Walter - Needlefelted Dog and Carved Print

 

I like to use my drawings and doodles for inspiration for my mohair and wool critters.  Here is a carved print "A Day with Walter" that I did from a drawing.  This became the inspiration for a needle-felted dog, Walter.  I decided to needlefelt him because I wanted to add the surface design Walter has in the print.

 

Here is the needlefelted version of Walter made with wool fiber.  He is 2 1/4" tall and 3" long.  He has glass eyes and an inner wire armature.  He has details of needle-felted colored wool.  I hand colored his head and body to give him a pale peachy color.

Walter and his carved print are now available as a set in my Etsy shop.

Illustration Friday - Sugary

This week's topic for Illustration Friday is - "sugary".

The dollies became over-enthusiatic when decorating their homemade pastry and tossed the sugary sprinkles all over.

Illustration Friday - Clutter

The topic for this week's Illustration Friday is "clutter". I'm late getting this entered. I couldn't decide about coloring it, but decided to keep it black and white.

Tilly (my daughter's favorite name when she was little) had a hard day at work, took off her socks and boots, threw down her books, and collapsed in a corner with a bowl of walnuts.

Illustration Friday - Detach

This week's topic for Illustration Friday is "detach".

Every day when Isabella had her morning cupcake, she would "detach" the chocolate icing topping with the white squiggle and eat it first.  It was her favorite part.  This is a digital painting made in Adobe Illustrator and Corel Painter.

Illustration Friday - Sail

The topic for this week's  Illustration Friday is "sail".  "Sailing, Sailing" is a digital painting made in Illustrator and Painter.  I used one of my fantasy critters from my collage work (the one-eyed, one-legged purple guy) as inspiration and one of my doodly drawings as a starting point.   I played around with layers, blends, and transparencies in Illustrator, and found from a Painter help forum that there was a bug in Painter X.  "Preserve transparency" in the layers panel seems to be enabled and won't let you draw on a new layer.  The way around it was to click on "preserve transparency" so it is checked, then uncheck it.  Then I was able to draw on a new layer.  I had fun with this one.

Illustration Friday - Canned

Illustration Friday - Canned

I love skinless and boneless Norwegian sardines and have been eating them a lot recently.  These are "Fancy Norwegian Sardines in Oil".  They are wearing their best Sunday outfits and are swimming in oil.  It is a soft carved print (or eraser carving).

Illustration Friday - Enough

I participated again this week in Illustration Friday.  The topic this week is "enough".  It's a small digital painting about 5" x 6" and was made in Adobe Illustrator.  This is the first time I used the Live Paint feature, which took a little while to get used to.

Illustration Friday - Foggy

I found the delightful website, "Illustration Friday", and decided to participate this week.  "Illustration Friday" is a weekly art exhibit that anyone, illustrators and artists of any skill level, can participate in by creating a picture in any medium that responds to the week's one word topic.

This week's topic was "foggy".  "Searching for Bertram in the Fog" is a small (5" x 7") digital painting made in Adobe Illustrator and Corel Painter.  I used a Wacom tablet with pen for doing the drawing.

Website Up - Using Dreamweaver and Illustrator

I finally got my website, ellifolks.com, up and working.  It's here, if you would like to take a look.  I designed the site in Dreamweaver.  The graphics were made in Adobe Illustrator, and then were saved "for web and devices" as gifs.  Graphics can be added to Dreamweaver from inside the root site folder there.  I think Dreamweaver has a pretty steep learning curve, and am just starting to get the feel for it.  The lynda.com videos were very helpful, as was the book Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Hands-On Training by Garrick Chow taken from the lynda.com Dreamweaver CS3 videos.

A blobby shape is refined by redrawing pencil lines in Adobe Illustrator. The first drawing shows the original drawing in Illustrator. The second drawing shows a revised version after redrawing the left side. The third drawing is the revised version after redrawing the right side. The fourth drawing has a face and ears added to the final revised face shape. Here I have "edit selected paths" checked and "within _ pixels" set to 12. You can play around with the settings to see the different effects you can get.

When drawing in Illustrator, I usually use the pencil.  I like that you can adjust lines that are selected by redrawing them.  The old line is then automatically replaced with the new one.  This is a lot faster than erasing and redrawing with a pencil and paper.  It only works for new lines or lines selected with the arrow tool that are within the distance you have set in the pencil tool preferences.  (Double click on pencil tool or hit "enter" on keyboard when pencil tool is active to bring up the pencil tool preferences.)  You can also manually select any line, and the pencil tool can then redraw it.