a cat, a bat, and three owls - wisdom for illustration friday

A little ink and colored pencil sketch of a cat, a bat, and three owls, for the Illustration Friday prompt this week (wisdom):

Here's a close up of the cat and two of the owls:

What does this all mean? I'm not sure, but here are three guesses:

1. If you're an owl, watch out for cats.
2. If you're a cat, watch out for wise owls.
3. If you're a bat, sleep when you're tired and let the owls worry about the cats.

Or maybe it's just a fun little sketch and it doesn't have any deeper meaning than that!

thoughts about spring weather, illustrated with sketches

In honor of the new sketch section on my website, here are some thoughts about spring weather, illustrated with sketches:

Spring has sprung, like a cow on a pogo stick!

When the spring weather is nice, you can pretend to be a superhero, just like when you were little (all you needed was a cape):

It's not amusing on days when the weather still thinks it's winter (so says this owl):

Days that are rainy aren't too bad when you have an umbrella to dance with:

If it's too rainy (or windy, or pollen-y) to go out, you can still stay in and dance around the room, read a book, and then dance around the room again:

When it's dark and stormy out, it might sound like an armadillo is bowling:

But don't worry, it will be warm enough to go swimming soon!

No matter what the weather, or whether you're inside or out, there's a chance that you'll come up with an idea for a story about the weather:

If that happens, try to write it down so you don't sleepwalk through the day, trying not to forget your story:

Happy Spring Everyone!

I hope your spring weather is wonderful! Or if not, I hope you get to dance with an umbrella or stay inside with a good book and an occasional dance break.

p.s. There's more art on my website, including the new sketch section, and a few of these images too.

Dr. Seuss inspired artwork for his birthday, plus Read Across America and World Read Aloud Day

Today would have been the 111th birthday of Dr. Seuss! In 2012, I celebrated his birthday for the whole month, by creating weekly art inspired by his books. Found them today and thought I'd post them again for fun. I asked myself a series of questions to come up with what to draw from which books. Questions and art shown below:

Q: What if The Cat In The Hat had a brother or sister who liked eating fish?

Q: What if you combined the two Dr. Seuss books, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish? (You'd get the book: Oh, The Places You'll Fish!)

Here's a close up of the fish driving the car (FYI, the colors in both pictures are exactly the same - like the closeup below - not sure why the one above is different on Blogger!):

Q: What if Horton heard a Who, and also a What, Where, Why, When, and How? (He’s holding all those worlds in his trunk, and is a US Marshall offering them witness protection too - apparently I was also inspired by a TV show about WitSec.)

Q: What if Sue (from Fox in Socks) was swamped with sock orders and had to sew six thousand socks?

Sue sewing socks was my favorite of the group, because it was inspired by Dr. Seuss, but done in my style and with my characters helping Sue. My second favorite is Horton, but they were all fun to do.

Here's closeup of the cow helping Sue with her yarn:

And here's a closeup of the bunny, who is my favorite character from this drawing. Thinking about doing more art with this bunny, and maybe the cow, owl and bird too!

Final Q: What if the green eggs and ham were returned to Sam in exchange for a birthday cake? (Sam is a bit stunned by this development, BTW.)

Happy Birthday  to Dr. Seuss! All his wacky stories and characters have inspired me since I was a kid, and inspired these drawings too.

Today is also Read Across America Day. Read Across America is the NEA's program to foster a love of reading in children and teens all year long. The theme this year is, Oh the Places You'll Go!

And Wednesday is World Read Aloud Day, which celebrates the importance of reading aloud and sharing stories around the world.

I'm going to read a book to celebrate this week, how about you? Happy reading everyone!

p.s. For those who like to know about art mediums used, the first three images were pen and ink, then colored in Photoshop, image four was re-drawn and colored in Photoshop, and the last image is pencil and ballpoint pen with colored pencil.

puppets, pumpkins, boo, and bats

This week I drew five images over seven days for #inktober and Illustration Friday. This first image is my Frankenstein cow making a Halloween appearance with a pumpkin, ghost, and owl. Still trying to find the right look for him. This look is close to the original sketches I did a long time ago:

I actually did this pumpkin for the first image this week, but it's second on the list (Frankenstein cow wanted to go first). You can't see it from this small picture, but there are images of ghosts, bats, witches, and cats inside the pumpkin stem and the pumpkin face.

The prompt for Illustration Friday this week is puppet. I couldn't resist drawing a trick-or-treating dog being given candy treats by a chicken (all orchestrated by the puppet master girl, of course).

I wanted to do a word image, and this is what happened. No idea why there are spiders with the ghosts, but it was fun to do and I like how it turned out.

I unearthed an old pencil sketch with bats this week, and decided it looked like a face, so I inked it and added a moon in the middle for the nose. This was a small part of a larger sketch. The rest of it is pretty bad, but I like the bat face and wanted to save that part. 

This is the last week of #inktober! Only one more post (Friday) with Halloweenie ink drawings. Not sure yet what November will bring. Stay tuned!


Want to see my other inktober images? Click here to check them out.