Illustration Friday: UNICORN

My favorite topic EVER is this week's Illustration Friday theme: UNICORN! Okay, I have quite a few, so I'm going to share them all with you here—and don't forget to check out and 'like' your favorites on my instagram account: mb.illustration!

A gift for a friend… back in the mid-1990s, I drew a lot of unicorns like this.
1999. Colored Pencil & Ink.

The Spanish Unicorn… the one that started me on this project of Unicorns of the World.
1998. Colored Pencil

Detail… I was still 'discovering' colored pencil back then, as you can see, I was having fun.
*didn't have a great scanner or auto-merge in Photoshop back then either… so all my images of this one are fairly poor.

The Caribbean Unicorn (I call them Licorne Caraïbes)
1999. Colored Pencil

Ki-lin, the Chinese Unicorn… or one of them.
1999. Colored Pencil

An African unicorn of the Serengeti (Saamoja Upangatiga).
1999. Colored Pencil

The Volcano Unicorn of the Pacific Rim of Fire… Lae-Hao-Kela
1999. Colored Pencil

The Amazonian Unicorn, Unchifre.
1999. Colored Pencil

  

The Japanese Unicorn: Kirin
1999. Colored Pencil

The Arctic Unicorn, Yksisarvinen.
1999. Colored Pencil

  

Another African Unicorn… the Saharan.
2000. Colored Pencil

One more African Unicorn, the Madagascan Unicorn.
2000. Colored Pencil

  

Inspired by Illustration Friday itself: Smitten
#feartheunicorn

Illustration Friday: ZODIAC

So, this is a bit of a repeat, originally created and posted for Alphabeasts—but totally worth it because I love this piece and it totally applies to this weeks topic. I'm still planning to try do to a new zodiac piece (perhaps a Chinese zodiac, it is the year of the horse!).

iFri Afternoon (9/21)

Kind of a whirlwind week here … including fun design projects (super-cute booklets and maps!), quotes and contracts for illustration projects (not as much fun, cough-cough), and diving into the World of WordPress (not unlike some torture devices I've heard of)! AH!
I'm lucky to end each and every week with a scheduled Friday afternoon Illustration Friday session at a local coffee house with my colleagues at Tangerine Café. Although yesterday's #iFri session turned out to be more of a wordpress workshop, I'm not complaining – that stuff will come in handy!
I grabbed a new sketchbook (not moleskin, shocker!) and doodled until I filled a page, testing out some new pen & pencils samples I got last week at a CPSA meeting with Prismacolor Rep, Shelley Minnis. Most of this is stream-of-consciousness / idea generating chicken-scratch – but a solid idea did take root and I hope to keep working on it today at our regularly scheduled monthly CPSA meeting (CPSA-DC219, ABQ).

Sketching for #ifri for a change!!

So, this talking about stuff I'm doing thing, here on the blog – do you like it? Is this stuff even remotely interesting in the least? I've never really used the blog of discussion before, it's always just been a way to share sketches and extras that aren't 'portfolio' work.
After a crazy-busy summer work schedule and ignoring my blog for 3 months, I'm trying to make an effort to post here more often – especially since I discovered I have nearly 40 people subscribed to it!  (thanks folks!) Let me know what you think. ;)

New Work: The Z-Kids 5 yr Celebration

Last week I learned from my friend, Christina Rodriguez, about Aaron Zenz's art-blog project (loveingly titled: Chicken Nugget Lemon Tooty) started for his kids (the Z-Kids). Turns out they are going to be celebrating their 5th anniversary next week, wow! In celebration of this anniversary, Aaron and kids invited artist friends to peruse the collected works on the blog, and recreate it in their own illustrative style (an event they started 2 years ago with the Z-Kids blog 3rd anniversary).

It was hard to choose, but I ended up picking this little Wabbit, by Gracie. I enjoy venturing into the darker side of illustration once in a while…but the more playful side of the darker side, kinda like Tim Burton ;). Anyway, I started some sketches, and just kept working at it for a few days, all teh while planning to incorporate the wonderful subtitle of the piece into the artwork (because it's just too funny and I also enjoy hand-lettering)… and here are the results:

Gracie's Original Drawing:
My Recreation:

Aaron tells me the celebreation post with the collected submissions will be posted around the end of this coming week - check for it - and visit the Z-Kids blog often, they're awesome!

Live Model Drawing Session

My local CPSA district chapter (219) had our monthly meeting this past Saturday and we had a special treat! The meeting theme was portraits and one of our members brought in a live model so we could all sit and draw together. It's been a long time since I've worked from a live model - I love my photo references, but it was fun. I really enjoyed the pure drawing time. I wish I had spent some time doing quick gestural sketches, but since we were focusing on portrait, and the model wasn't moving or trying different poses, it didn't really make sense to do them.

So, here's our lovely model, her name was Nafshiyah:


I started with a warm-up sketch in graphite:



And then I decided to try my colored pencils… which is a little tough given that colored pencil doesn't really erase - it's more of commitment:


This is a little test I threw together in photoshop - an overlay of my second drawing and my reference photo. Looks pretty good! I impressed myself!! But I can see I've made the eyes too large, plus low and to the right (set back on face) - which led to a displaced ear (also too low and set back), but it appears to be approximately the right size. Which is funny because one of the members walking through the session commented that she thought it might be too small. ;)