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...