Illustration Friday: THE ZOO

I've been slacking on my Illustration Friday contributions lately, but I had to get in on this week's topic. Cincinnati has a phenomenal zoo, it's within a mile of my apartment, I used to work there, and I just went there a few weeks ago How could I NOT take the opportunity to chatter (and draw!) about all that??

I don't know about other zoos (I've only been to St. Louis's and DC's) but at the Cincinnati Zoo the peacocks are kept uncaged. They wander all over the park, in the parking lot, and, on one memorable occasion in the summer of 2005, into the gift shop where I was working (a momma peacock and her brood of lined-up chicks browsed the t-shirt section for a while, but didn't end up buying anything).

Needless to say, I'm a huge fan of the zoo. I've made many memories at ours (you think I'm yammering away now? I've barely scratched the surface!!) They're great places to take kids (unless the kid in question wants to get up close and personal with the rhinos... another summer job experience that I won't elaborate on), they do great environmental work through endangered species protection, and provided the set-up for one of the best books ever, Yann Martel's Life of Pi.

Mmm, what a delightful topic. Thanks IF!!

p.s. Anybody else have some Simon & Garfunkel in their head now? Something tells me it's all happening at the zoo....

Illustration Friday: SUPERSTITION

"I'm not superstitious. But maybe I'm just a little stitious." -Michael Scott, loosely quoted

It's a holiday week, so I'm being lazy and recycling an old sketch.

Another try

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I've intended for a while to do more portraits in the style of this Gandhi piece. These are two sketches for a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Though I guess if you couldn't tell that, I haven't done a very good job.) They're very preliminary and both would need some serious improvement before I even think of color. Right now I like the style of the first and the pose of the second best, though the addition of hands would be a challenge for me, but who doesn't love a challenge? (True story: the only day of figure drawing I missed was the one day we covered hands and feet. Three days on the skeleton, a billion on gesture, ten plus of self portraits, I couldn't have missed one of those? Oy.)

I'd love to hear input on these. I'll also need help picking a color scheme and a quote-- anybody have a favorite MLKism? My first thought is "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," but there are so many gems....

Illustration Friday: HATS

In the interest of being practical, Max has tried out all sorts of different jobs with all sorts of different hats. But everybody knows what he really wants to do, where his real talent lies....