Illustration Friday - Safe

I have been slacking on the challenges lately. Thanks to Amy's suggestion of using my Illustration Friday post for Inspire Me Thursday challenge of "Inspired by Design" seems to be a perfect fit, and multi-tasking use of one post ;)

Safe is the challenge for this week's Illustration Friday, dedicated to my little canary who died a couple of years ago. I tried to keep him safe from harm. But he succumb to his illness one night and I buried him in the backyard under his own little tiles that read "Birdie's Eternal Song". I try to keep my cocker, Scooter safe from pain, keep my son safe from the world, keep my mom safe from cruelity, my husband safe. Don't we spend most of our lives trying to keep the ones we love, safe?
My apologies to this 1930's illustrator.



Inspired by these beautiful Deco images sweetly supplied by normavalentine, I made some color swatches for a project I am working on. I picked this, this and this for starters. Drawing some boxes and sampling the color in Adobe Illustrator and saving a file for later. It is a wonderful way to have color inspiration on hand.



Then I came across this Cigarette Card and I love the texture of the background. I have some of these and the offset printing, when it is just a little off, is what gives it interest! I have always wanted to try this and yesterday I did a very quick experiment with dotted lines in Adobe Illustrator but I like the effect and want to redo it now with more attention to the patterns. And for the image illustrated itself, it just spoke to me. And I wanted to recreate it.



Admittedly, I have not had time to just play in Adobe Illustrator lately, except to throw the quickest image together in 20 minutes for work. So I stopped, took time to play, to look, to revel in color and sweet, simple, clean lines, to remember the program that I love so much. What fun! My extra time lately has been going to crafts, paintings and shrines, and I missed you old friend!