Cracked things in pen and ink... and other stuff

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is Cracked. Lots of ideas for this one.

Too many, maybe. I had trouble trying to sort them out.

Nothing to do, I guess, but start doodling.

I was thinking at first of windshields or something like that, but I wasn't in the mood for a line study and ended up getting bored pretty quickly there. Then I thought that maybe I'd just do a whole page of various crack patterns, but that started to look a little... um... not what I wanted.

I hate having more than one idea. It means that I have to be decisive, and I'm just not very good at that.

Still thinking at this point in the moleskine, obviously.

Then I thought of trees.

I tend to think of trees a lot, really. I like playing with branching.

Old, cracked tree it is, then. And yes, this one's my real entry (as usual, click on the photo for a larger version). A tree cracked by lightening, maybe, or (more likely around here) the weight of a heavy spring snowfall on branches that were just getting ready to bud out. I don't think that we had too many broken trees in the last storm (just last week... gotta love an Alberta spring, don't you?), but a couple of years ago we lost a fair number of branches (and a few trees) to a stupidly late, stupidly heavy snow.

Get the feeling that I really love snow?

Yeah. Especially in the spring...

Anyway, the tree's what I'm counting as my response to the prompt, but just for fun I thought I'd add something else. It's the return of the little modelling clay men!

Yep. I'm a five-year-old.

This one? I dunno. I'm thinking that maybe some kind of freak earthquake opened up a fault line on the sketch pad?

It's cracked, anyway.

Cracked out...

Tulip in... finger paint?

Um, yeah. "Messless" finger paint on reactive paper.

Maybe the less said about this one the better?

Although... my inner five-year-old has certainly been coming out a lot in the past couple of days, hasn't she? Makes a person wonder, really.

Laundry Men in modelling clay

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is Parade. This week's picture is decidedly not an illustration...

The thing is, I'm a bit under the weather and didn't have the patience to doodle. I did, however, feel like being a five-year-old. The result? A parade of little clay men on a laundry basket. And why a laundry basket? Well, if you were a little clay man wouldn't you want to parade on a laundry basket?

Ok, seriously? I'd just finished folding some towels.

Max the cat, incidentally, did help with the modelling somewhat. He didn't stick around to have his photo taken this time, though.

Oh, and I really have no idea why the purple guy has it in for the white guy. Maybe they were just having a collectively bad day....

Spider, moth and rose in pen and ink

Illustration Friday's prompt this week is Hierarchy. Odd one, I think. My mind went all sorts of ways. Totem poles, circus balancing acts... but in the end I went back to nature. Stick with what you're familiar with, I guess.

This was inspired by a photo I took last year (or maybe the year before. Not like it matters. And, as usual, click on the photo to enlarge it). I'd post a link but I think it's on my work blog. I kind of like to keep work and personal stuff separate. Anyway, I spotted a tiny moth on this wild rose bush. The fact that it wasn't moving gave me the hint to look for the even tinier crab spider that was eating it.

And what does this have to do with hierarchy? Well, at first glance it's a pretty simple food chain. The rose leaves were eaten by some insect (not the moth, though), and the spider's eating the moth. Top man on the pyramid, right?

I suppose. But which one lasts longest in the end? Not the spider, and obviously not the moth. And without the plant, neither the moth (which, as a caterpillar, would have depended on some kind of plant for food) nor the spider (which,as an ambush predator, needs the plant for shelter and camouflage) would even exist.

Sometimes it just isn't as simple as who's on the top rung of the ladder. Even in human society, each level of the hierarchy is dependent on all of the others. Sometimes we just forget that, I figure.