I give you ‘the barnyard sweater gang’.

So, since I’ve been stuck on funny looking chicks, I figured why not also dress them in poorly fitting sweaters and throw in some of the tall ones I’ve been sketching.

It’s interesting that just by the direction they’re pointing (two going one direction and one the other) there’s some tension or emotion implied. I added just a hint of eye direction to the one on the left that seems to enhance this idea.

These chickens probably need to be translated to t-shirt designs in cafe express…

I have no idea where this idea came from. I must have seen something that reminded me of Thelma and Louise so that it popped into my head when I was pondering this one.

I played around with a different brush on this one where I just layered all the color over the background color so that it has something of a block print texture mixed in there.

The line work is pretty simple compared to the last couple I’ve done, which is something I thought would be fun to play around with more. I have no idea why I keep drawing chickens, but for some reason I’ve got these short, squat little guys stuck in my head, so I guess I should keep drawing them until they go away.

I’ve been looking at some steam punk artwork this week (Steampunk Palin to be exact), which got me moderately interested in trying some things in that style. While this isn’t really that theme, the illustrations I was looking at are what led me to this idea, which I thought came out pretty good.

I used the same pen I used for the chicken mystery piece, which is just a Bic gel ink writing pen, fine point. For whatever reason I’ve really taken to using it for sketching and thought I’d see how I liked it for filling in shading. It makes really smooth lines and never seems to skip, which is usually the problem I have when using any pen for this type of work.

So, all-in-all, I think this one came out pretty good. I suppose I could have done more with the background, but I was really just trying to see what I could do with dust vs. no dust on a figure. I also played around a bit with adding tint colors over top of a base color which I also thought was fairly successful. And, of course, I layered a filter over top with some selective erasing to push the contrast and shapes, while highlighting specific areas of detail (which appears to be my theme for this year again).

This is my actual entry for the Illustration Friday theme of ‘Chicken’. I didn’t have an idea of where to go with this, until I caught the name of the person who suggested this subject – chickengirl.

I figured how much more perfect could you get than chicken girl. So, I wanted to see if I could do it comic book style, but with a silly outfit.

The whole outfit isn’t as silly as I was planning, but the helmet is pretty silly and the egg-gun seemed silly as well. So, overall, I’m pretty happy with it.

Hopefully the actual chickengirl will find it amusing if she ever happens to see this.

The Illustration Friday theme is ‘Chicken’, so, while this isn’t my submission, it is a compilation of some silly sketches I did, while sitting in a few meetings.

Inspired by my good friend Breadwig.

I’m sure there’s a story here somewhere, but I’ll leave that up to you to figure out.

So, these were just sketches on note paper with a new pen I bought before Christmas. I just scanned them, cut out the ones I liked, put them together and colored it.

vrooom….

Just a quick scribble and inking of an idea I had for ‘transportation’, the next Illustration Friday subject.

Thought it would be fun to try something with more movement and gesture (it’s occurred to me that I’ve been stuck on still images).

I haven’t done this sort of thing for awhile, so I didn’t entirely shake the rust off my technique, but I’m pretty happy with the result.

Plus it makes we want to make a race car sound… that’s a success, right?

Acrobat… get it?…huh, huh?… See what I did there?

Yeah, i know… kinda stupid. But I had an idea in my head for last week’s IF (Proverb) and since I didn’t have time to do that one, I carried over the idea to this week.

Practice is always good, right?

This was supposed to be for last week’s Illustration Friday theme, but I re-drew part of it, so I didn’t have it finished in time.

I chose she-hulk for no particular reason. I just thought the juxtaposition of a super-hero character and dessert was funny, and I was looking at some hulk comic art last week… so there you go.

I’m actually pretty happy with this. I ran a filter over the whole thing when I was done, which made the value transitions much harder edged. If you look at my work over the last couple years, you’ll see that I’ve been experimenting with this a lot. Something about it is very appealing to me. Maybe it’s just because I can let the computer do something for me that I have trouble doing on my own… push the contrast.

At any rate, I rather like this one and it was good practice.

So, two birds with one stone here… yeah, pun intended… Illustration Friday theme of caged and another bird entry into the fray.

I did this one all with a couple felt-tip pens, then ran it through a couple filters.

I intentionally kept the bird shading and details simplistic to see how it might look with a slightly tighter overall illustration (as compared to the previous bird). It’s not too bad, and I like the controlled sloppiness of the color/background.

I’ll have to see how much I can push this direction.

Okay, so my friend Bryan has been laying the bird challenge out there for a few weeks now. And I finally decided I could no longer contain my desire to draw silly birds.

So, I give you my first entry into the fray.

With a little luck, we can keep this silliness going for a little while and have some fun trying to come up with new, spontaneous, aviary goodness.