Illustration Friday - Explore

I've been wanting to explore using acrylics on paper as an alternative to watercolour and gouache so it was great that Liquitex did a demo at the Guelph School Of Art on Sunday, at the end we received a  free brush, gloss medium and 2 tubes of paint, a Gold Green and a Magenta which accounts for the colours used here

Jimi Hendrix certainly explored many new possibilities for the electric guitar during his sadly short career

Illustration Friday - Stretch

markers and coloured pencils in Moleskine sketchbook

Illustration Friday - Whiskers

This is a portrait of Emma, one of my daughter's beautiful cats

Illustration Friday - Tree

Markers in sketchbook

Illustration Friday - Shy

Nothing shy about the young ladies who posed for Playboy magazine such as this lovely Miss April from 1959. Another tip of the bowler hat to Rene Magritte, Part of my Centrefold Variations Set on Flickr - CAUTION: other pictures in the set are more explicit nudes

Illustration Friday - Haunt

Based on an older photo of the great American writer Joyce Carol Oates, many of her stories and characters will haunt you for a very long time

Illustration Friday - Water

I have hit a lot of golf balls into the water on this hole. This is the 6th hole at Victoria Park East golf course in Guelph, Ontario

Illustration Friday Mirror

An idea stolen from one of my favourite painters, Rene Magritte

Illustration Friday - Book

The book I'm currently reading is "The Story of the Night" by the wonderful Irish writer Colm Toibin

Illustration Friday - Swamp

Not sure of the difference between a swamp and a marsh, this is loosely based on a photo of Rattray Marsh in Mississauga, Ontario

Illustration Friday - Shades

I wasn't planning to do another portrait of Tom Waits but then I saw this poster for Record Store Day http://www.recordstoreday.com/CustomPage/1304 - you need to scroll down a bit to see the poster - and then I saw the Illustration Friday topic so I really had no choice, this is a quick sketch with 2 shades of blue marker on an old piece of glossy paper I had lying around

Illustration Friday - Intention

Perhaps the greatest example of good intentions going horribly wrong was Prohibition in the US in the 1920's. It led to violence and the establishment of organized crime on a huge scale. I'm just catching up on season 2 of the excellent - though excessively violent - HBO series Boardwalk Empire starring the great actor Steve Buscemi

I wasn't entirely happy with the ink version of this so I went at it with some markers, I like this version a little better

Illustration Friday - Capable

I was a little disappointed in the albums Tom Waits released after Mule Variations but his latest, Bad As Me, shows he is still capable of writing great songs and creating highly original music

this is based on a screen capture from Youtube, way back in 1977 on a German TV show
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByomIJf5n9w&feature=bf_next&list=PL85A189277660E47F&lf=mh_lolz&shuffle=789862

Illustration Friday - Fluid

Very high on my list of favourite fluids

Illustration Friday - Popularity

I cannot comprehend the popularity of Dancing With The Stars. Who needs to see a bunch of obscure - at least to me - so-called celebrities embarrass themselves doing something they are not good at? There are so many excellent ballroom and performance dancers out there who almost no-one ever goes to see yet millions watch this nonsense. But maybe I'm just still annoyed that Lil Kim was eliminated so quickly the season she was on

Illustration Friday - Suspense

The great film director Alfred Hitchcock was oftem referred to as the master of suspense. I used to love his anthology series on TV when I was a kid

Illustration Friday - Forward

Bill suddenly realized that he had forwarded THAT e-mail to the president of the company

Illustration Friday - Twirl

A man who really knew how to twirl a moustache, the wild and wonderful Salvador Dali

Illustration Friday - Grounded

Most of the music I love is grounded in the blues. John Lee Hooker was one of the greats of the form, I had the good fortune to see him perform solo in a small coffehouse called the Riverboat in Toronto in the early seventies, it was amazing what he could do with just a guitar and his incredible voice

Illustration Friday - Highlight

One of the highlights of 2011 for me was joining the Julia Kay's Portrait Party group on Flickr found here:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/portraitparty/
A wonderfully inspiring and supportive group of artists from around the world, it's been a lot of fun. I can't believe I've already done 75, these are some I'm pretty happy with

You can see the individual ones in my Flickr photostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cobol/6608050559/in/photostream