Illustration Friday - Trick or Treat

Last night I screwed up a drawing, which was almost ready. To end the night in a positive way I drew something for this weeks topic of Illustration Friday. When I ended it I noticed that the girl looks very, very much like our daughter. Sometimes things just have to happen, I guess and for sure it was a positive ending of an evening full of stress and frustration.

Quick sketch

Just a quick sketch at the end of a very busy week at home and at work. Hardly no time to make any drawings.

Illustration Friday - Grow

This year we have had our first harvest of apples and pears. We planted the trees two years ago in the garden of our new house. Last season we didn't see any fruit on the trees and we were a bit disappointed, but this year everything turned out fine. It was a lesson: something it takes time to grow...
I made this black and white illustration last year for a grammatical teaching method. Pen and ink on 250 grams watercolourpaper.

Inside our hotelroom

Our hotelroom in Hotel Croixville was quite small. The double-sized bed and the closet made it very difficult to move around. The room was even that small, that it was impossible for me to draw the sketch in the room itself. I made this sketch by memory, sitting in the foyer of the hotel.
At least the room was clean and the matrass was surprisingly good. Most hotels offer beds in which you can't sleep the first night, or all the nights of your stay, but this bed was actually very comfortable. We slept very well during our stay in Hotel Croixville. Except for one night.
We woke up in the middle of the third night of our stay. We couldn't tell why. Everything was dark and quite and just when we were snoozing away we heard a loud cry. It was difficult to say where it came from. Came it from another hotelroom? From outside? The mountains surrounding the hotel? For three or four times we heard someone screaming. We couldn't tell it was a man or woman. Suddenly everything was quite again, but we couldn't catch our sleep again that night.
The next morning we asked madame Michelle if she heard something that night, but she pretended (?) she couldn't understand our question. Later that day I spoke about the incident with Christian, but he also seemed not to understand our question. Too bad I didn't had the opportunity to speak to other hotelguests that day. Maybe they could give us some answers. For now it stayed an unsolved mystery.

Illustration Friday - Extremes

This was a sketch I made for a website. You can order mugs on that website. All sorts of mugs. I thought it was a good idea to use a long, thin mug and a shorter, thicker one to visualize the variety of mugs that can be bought. I didn't want them to look like Laurel and Hardy, it just happened. Anyway, this idea didn't make it. Maybe to "extreme''?

Ship full of questions

I am still struggling with the sketch of Cornelius Playfull's ship. Somehow I have the feeling that it's not very clear in this stadium on what scale I'm working. I mean: the scale of the ship versus the children. I am not even sure if I'll draw three or five children. I'm always told that 'three is a crowd', but on this ship I get the feeling that five kids makes more 'crowd' than three. But keeping that in mind I don't know yet where I can place five children logically. And what about a shark? Or a treasure? Or an island in the background? Questions, questions, questions.

Illustration Friday - Open

Drawing exercise

"Once upon a time ago" I tried to make a living by drawing. But things went a little different as planned and I had to change course. For years I didn't draw at all, but recently I took up the old pencils and digged up the old sketchbooks. I also bought a teaching book "Capturing Texture by Michael Warr" which I can recommend to anyone who loves drawing and painting.
I wanted to use the book to pick up my old drawing pace, but luckely enough I must say that there's so much coming to me that I hardly find time to work out every idea that's coming up. Of course the internet is nowadays a big source of ideas and drawing techniques. But I must say that an old-fashioned book can be inspiring as well. Not to ignore the fact that pictures look better in print than on the screen of your computer.
The exercise above was about drawing a piece of white paper on a white background with only an HB pencil to be used.

Old sketchbook

Sometimes you need a new sketchbook. The third one this year, already. As I was looking what I've made so far, I came across a sketch I made several months ago. I made this whole scene up. I was curious if I could place some things of personal interests in one drawing. The Citroen DS, a cyclist, a paraglider, all in a typical French countryside setting. Maybe the Alps or Provence, I don't know. I think that the atmosphere of the whole drawing is in this case of more importance than if it's actually an existing location.
Maybe I find in the near future time to work this theme out. I think it has potential. (But without the weed on the second floor of the building)

Christian Michelle

As I told before Madame Michelle runs Hotel Croixville together with her son Christian. I am not exactly sure about his age, but my guess is that he must be at least 55 years of age. It is hard to get any information out of Christian, because he speaks only French and knows only a few German words. The only Dutch word he knows, by the way, is: "geitenkaas".
As far as I concluded out of a brief encounter I had with him in the lobby, Christian was never married. He had once a fiancee, but his mother was not very fond about his choice of heart. She did everything in her power to make the girl realize that there were far more better husbands-to-be than her one and only son Christian. After the death of Christian's father, monsieur Alphonse Michelle, he and his mother had to run the hotel together and Christian never had taken the opportunity to have a go at other girls.
If I understood him correctly there was about twenty years ago a German family staying in the hotel with their daughter. She was celebrating her 30th birthday in the hotel and Christian's eyes lightened up as he told me what happened afterwards that birthdayparty. I couldn't follow it completely, but it had to do something with the showers on the camping. I think.

Work in progress

Yesterdaynight I worked on the sketch of Cornelius Playfulls ship. I added C. himself, but still do not know where to put his friends. On deck, behind the wheel, swimming? There are to many options, I'm afraid. Making an illustration is not just drawing, painting or anything else, but mostly taking decisions what to do or not. Sometimes I find that the most difficult part of an illustration.

Illustration Friday - the Blues

Mondaymorning at the office
That's the real blues
Only several mugs of coffee
Can fade that feeling away.