Wild raspberry in pigment pen

A couple of years ago I started a berry bush display for work. I managed a half-dozen or so doodles (they're uploaded here, if you're curious and want to search around a bit) and then got busy with other things. Last year I didn't get back to it at all.

Behold! The return of the berry display!

Erm, more or less.

These are all meant to be scanned and added to interpretive panels (sometime in the next century, at the rate I'm going), so they're pretty much just bare line illustration with a minimum of shading. Or none, as today's effort seems to indicate.

One problem, and I'll have to see how it matches up: I did the first set with a dip pen, but I so much didn't want to fiddle with a dip pen today that I just used my nylon-tip instead. Less variety in the line, I suppose, but I hope it won't be too noticeable.

The Stuff in graphite

This is my go at Routine for Illustration Friday. Done very quickly on my lunch hour.

As usual.

One of these days I'll actually sit down and do this properly, you know. And then we'll all die of shock.

I had intended to do something completely different, but when I sat down with The Stuff and started sharpening pencils (a bit of a compulsive thing with me)... well, obviously it's the usual drawing routine that had to become the subject. The pencils, sharpener, polymer eraser (plus a couple of cut-off bits for detail work), the amorphous kneaded eraser for... to be honest, generally for cleaning my hands as I go if I'm doing smudgey things. Oh, and a backdrop of my pencil case, which apparently needs some dental work.

I did mention this was a lunch-hour jobbie, right?

Yeah.

Quick question

It should be obvious from my various snarky comments when I post things that I don't consider myself more than a doodler and wouldn't ever actually pursue displaying my... for lack of a better word, work.

However.

We have a staff exhibit coming up at real work, and I'm wondering what I should do about it. We're allowed to submit up to five pieces. I have a couple of photographs that might be suitable and there's still time before the deadline to force myself to sit down and do something that's more finished than a five-minute scribble... but are there things already posted here that I should consider having mounted?

I'm open to suggestions, I guess is what I'm saying. If you're willing to give me a few choice words, have a look at the blog's album here and tell me if you see anything that looks ok. If not, tell me that too. I'm a big girl. I can take it.

I can give it back, as well, but that's a whole 'nother topic.

Wild sunflower in pigment pen

Detach for Illustration Friday. The petals are detached from the flower, the flower's detached from the stem... pretty sad all around, really.

This was a very quick sketch on my lunch break. I would have done more with it, but since I'm not likely to do much doodling in my apartment until it's a) much cleaner and b) much cooler, you take the time you can get. I wouldn't mind exploring the theme a bit -- in pastels, maybe, so that a person could actually see the yellow petals contrasting with the dark centre -- but at least this gives the idea.

Lunch-hour scribble

It's a tree.

More or less.

Yeah, thanks for that moment of obviousness, Dee.

Ars Poetica

Never trust in words --
oh never trust in pit-bull words
they only wait for lapses in control
To clamp you by the metaphor
and shake and shake and shake and shake
until the damned thing's only fit
for amputation

There's nothing quite so otiose
as throttling a stillborn thought
Ideas that were meant to spring
full-armoured from the godly brow
instead come scrabbling meanly
down the jugular like
mutilated gutter rats
and gnaw their way through fingertips
with scratching out and scratching out
on paper

That bloody pulp, the end result
just sits there staring back at you
and no more soars on angel wings
than garbage trucks or some such things
that rattle you from sleep at six a.m.

ah, may as well give up and start again.

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A particularly violent spell of writer's block?

This was written quite some time ago, so I'm not really sure where I was going with it. Seems like kind of a bizarre mix of horror movie and W.S. Gilbert now, though. With a title stolen from Horace thrown in for good measure...

Weird, yes.

But somehow, fairly amusing. To me at least.

And just for the record, I have no idea (today) why there's so little punctuation in the thing.

Maple keys in pigment pen

Illustration Friday's word this week is Sail.

What? These are sails for a Manitoba Maple tree, aren't they? I mean, the only other way the tree is going to sail is if it's made into a boat...

Ok, the fact is that I'm a very landlocked person, and the first thing that came to mind with sail was sailing through the air rather than the water. As to the doodle itself, it was done very quickly this morning (in the time I should have been making lunch for work. Yeah, that was smart), and it shows. I'm not especially happy with it, but whatever.

I picked a few maple keys (samaras, technically, although around here most of the kids call them helicopters because of the way they glide when they fall) yesterday and then just dropped them in a pile on my table today to draw them. They aren't ripe yet -- still very green -- and that means they don't have as much textural interest as they will in the fall. Not like that matters for a ten-minute scribble too early in the morning, of course.

And yes, it's the second week in a row that the theme has sent me straight to seeds. What can I say? Naturalist, not artist.

Something weird

I'm not entirely sure what it is. Vaguely abstract-rose-ish, maybe?

Truth be known, I was just playing around with The Scribbler. Thanks to Sparroweye for the heads-up on that one. It's sort of fascinating to watch what it will generate from a silly doodle.

And obviously, if I'm posting a scribble I haven't bothered to do any real doodling these past couple of days. I also wasn't in the mood to look up a poem.

So there you go, I guess. Better than nothing.

Dandelion head in graphite

This week's Illustration Friday topic was poof! Their exclamation point, not mine.

Well, here's my version. Will I actually submit it this time?

Um, not likely. We'll see what I feel like in a day or two.

Oh, and the random speckles aren't really part of the doodle. The paper I was using was in a car accident.

Not my accident. Someone else's.

Long story.

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Ok, edit:

I submitted.

Yay me.