Illustration Friday - the Zoo

About this week's topic, the Zoo, I can only say that I always feel a bit sorry for those animals. Wildlife should be living in the wild, not behind bars. But let's not start a discussion, just enjoy the illustration.

Renault 4 delivery van

After Citroën introduced the 2CV AZU, Renault responded with a delivery van based on their Renault 4.

Adding some colour

Just for the fun I added some colour to the pencildrawing of yesterdays post. I was curious to see what happens. I think it's not an improvement, to be honest.

Folding your chute

Yesterday I folded my emergency parachute, which by the way I never hope to use during paragliding. There's always one stage when folding the chute I tend to forget. So last year I made this little sketch and, believe it or not, I didn't had to look at the sketch to know what I had to do! I simply memorized it.

Drawing exercise

This month's drawing exercise was to draw a paprika in black and white, with a 2B pencil. Only the outside of the paprika would be too simple, so it had to be cut in two pieces. Luckily enough only one piece had to be drawn, which proved to be difficult enough I must admit. The light and colours had to be captured in halftones. Something I always find challenging.

Illustration Friday - Superstition

I'm not superstitious. Never been. Researching for this weeks topic on Illustration Friday, I came across various items about superstition. The usual things as: hotelroom 13, never place a hat on the table, never place your keys on the table, etc.
I remembered a paraglidingtrip I made with some friends about three years ago. We went to France where I slept in room 13 and where I placed every night my flyinghelmet and carkeys on the table. Guess what: nothing happened! In fact I made some incredible flights. As did my friends.

Peugeot 403 pickup

Illustration Friday - Scale

When you're making an architectural drawing, you'll always have to be keen on the scale of things. For example the cartboard construction kit I had to draw for a publisher some years ago. The publisher was moving to a big, modern office building out of town and therefor leave the old buildings in the towncentre. For good times sake they wanted to give their employees, clients and other relations something to keep the memory to the lovely old buildings alive.
When I sketched the buildings I noticed pretty soon that they didn't fit in size to make the construction work. I had to downscale to far left building and upscale the two center buildings. This was what came up in my mind when I noticed this week's topic of Illustration Friday (or maybe I'm this week a bit too lazy to come up with a new drawing ;-)

Back to the fifties

About fifty years ago my father bought his first car: a Citroen 2 CV AZU.

Illustration Friday - Hats

This week's topic caused me some problems. I found the subject 'Hats' rather common. Thinking of that the associations House of Commons, House of Lords and 'Hats' of State came up. But the last one is in my opinion not even close to a joke. Then I thought of the hats clowns wear (Popov, Pierrot) and suddenly I realised that the comedians that I admire most wear the same hats! Ballpoint and watercolor helped me to visualize this amazing discovery.

No short stay

Last night I was drawing when suddenly the telephone rang, which sometimes occurs. Friends of ours were back in the country, returned from a short holidaybreak abroad. After several months of hard work and low income (they started their own business), it was time for them to get away from it all. Not too long and not too expensive, off course.
We told them about a nice, cheap little hotel we stayed in last Spring: Hotel Croixville. It was not quite in the region where they had planned their holiday, which was far more south, but they could use an adress to sleepover on their way back home.
After a long detour, which was actually much longer than planned, they finally arrived at 10 PM to find out that Hotel Croixville was: ...closed. According to a sign which was placed behind one of the windows, the hotel is now for sale. Strangely enough madame Michelle, nor her son Christian, didn't mention last Spring that they had plans to close the hotel. In fact Christian had plans to renovate a large part of the rooms, fixing the roof and expanding the campingsite.
I wonder what happened there that made them close the hotel.