Illustration Station

Journal cover.  Unfinished.

I painted it yesterday while I was basking in the ambiance of this hibiscus.  This plant is always in bloom.  Non-stop blooming, that's what I'm talkin' about. Blooming constantly.  I think it loves the art room.
The journal cover was just too drippy to do anything else to, so it'll be waiting for me when I get in there today.

This.  This is a snippet of the story I'm illustrating.  I'm currently figuring out the font and the pages containing the words.  Illustrating is waaay more difficult than painting a self-indulgent pretty picture.  Illustrating might do me in.  As in dead.  D.e.a.d. dead.  At least that's how I felt until yesterday.  Yesterday I had a breakthrough, an epiphany and just in the nick of time I might add.  Somehow while blundering along, as I've been doing for months, something clicked and I can see how I want it to look.  This is major.

I've been working on it so hard, and getting nowhere.  I've been on the hamster wheel.  But by gosh I haven't given up.  I just keep on painting and painting and painting crap-albeit cute enough crap that it keeps me going, but crap, none-the-less.
Its almost as if, like I posted just several days ago, as if I must do it wrong before I can do it right.  In this case it seems like I had to do it wrong every single way it could be done wrong-which is gazillions of ways people.  Lots of ways.  So I've been on this hamster wheel of crappy illustrations and finally, finally, finally one day something happened.  Accidentally, serendipitously, consciously, who cares?!!?  Maybe the Great Creator rolled his great eyes and came right down out of the sky screaming "I can't take it anymore watching you blunder around" and put the paint where it needed to go for me.  Something like that.
However it transpired, I'm grateful, grateful because I couldn't give up and I couldn't go on.

These, these were just pretty.  And I felt like they needed to be acknowledged before the late season Polar Vortex air gets them.  And it was so simple just to snap their picture with my Fancy, much simpler than illustrating.