Santa has been staying up late the past month trying to get all his work done.
He looks tired.
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philadelphia
Sink
The If word this week was “Sink”. I sketched up a man sinking in quicksand and ended up using that over on my other page(penandmarker.wordpress.com) where I draw an illustration every day for 365 days. I am just about to hit 100 drawings over on that site! You can check that drawing out here. The illustration ended up being a bit political just because I thought it fit the theme quite well. You can’t go anywhere these days without talk about the economy popping up, and that was the theme that I ran with for that illustration. For my illustration on this page I made something similar. For whatever reason I ended up changing the main person sinking from an old man into the Statue of Liberty. It doesn’t really mean anything, but I thought it would make a nice illustration. It’s a shame I don’t have an article to go along with it because I think it looks like something that would accompany an article in a magazine like the New Yorker, a weekly newspaper or something like that. Anyway, enough blabbing. Here it is:
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Howling at the moon (89)
Barlow (88)
I just finished reading ‘Salems Lot by Stephen King today. I liked the book a lot. After that I watched the 1979 miniseries, there were a good # of changes but I liked that miniseries as well. Next I’ll watch the 2004 version. Here is a drawing of Barlow (the head vampire) that I drew today.
Separated
This Friday the topic from IF was Separated. I don’t know all that much about the military, but I immediately thought about all the soldiers that go overseas and are separated from their loved ones for long periods of time. I can’t imagine going through that, I would never want to be that far away from my wife. Anyway, I suppose this illustration is in tribute of all the soldiers that will be far away from their loved ones this holiday season.
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Onion (82)
Stinky onion… ever notice that the smell of onion doesn’t come off your hands even after you wash them?
Swell Bubble Gum
When I was younger there was a factory a few blocks from my house in my hometown of Havertown. It was called the Swell Bubble Gum Factory. Years before that(and before I had been born) I believe it was called the Philadelphia Chewing Gum Company. It was magical to grow up so close to the factory. I remember summer days when my friends and I would ride our bikes to the 7-11 and get Slurpies, the best part though was that for blocks and blocks the air smelled like bubble gum! Swell made great products that I miss a heck of a lot. They made Crybabies(super sour gum) and Mouth-washers(they would coat your mouth in color) as well as bubble gum cigars and regular bubble gum(and a bunch of other products too!).Unfortunately the factory was torn down a couple of years ago and they are currently building a YMCA in its place. But I still have my memories. I decided that I wanted to mess around with their original logo and see what I could turn out. Well, here it is:
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Here are a couple other variations of the logo that I tried out:
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Here is the original logo that used to hang on the front of the building:
Swell Bubble Gum factory, you will be missed!
Stay
This weeks “IF” word was Stay. I tried working with a limited color palate. I think the use of blue really helps to push the idea that the dog is feeling blue himself. I was originally going to use my chihuahua as the dog in this, but I decided to go with a pug and found a nice reference online.
Here’s how it turned out:
Also, I was featured as the Pick of the Week for this past weeks Illustration Friday topic. The topic was Remedy and my post is just below this one. It is awesome being featured on Illustration Friday’s main page, my total page views yesterday reached 488. Today it is at 209 and the day isn’t even over yet! Thank you Illustrationfriday.com!
Midsummer Night
Just finished an illustration for IF, the theme was “Midsummer Night”. It got me thinking about when I was younger, before I found out about skateboards(those took up all my summer nights after that) and how simple life was. Playing Ghost in the Graveyard and catching fireflies. Well… here is my illustration:
I did the entire illustration while drinking beer, so I’m not sure how it’s gonna look when I’m sober. But I am trying to teach myself to be a little looser in my illustration style so I figured this would be an interesting way to test that out. As of right now I’m thinking that it looks pretty rad, we’ll see how I feel about it later.
