They knew that he was not afraid of them at all. He would stand and let them come quite close before walking away. Here is the passage from the book: 'And from time to time they would both meet a dog-fox the same one every time, they were sure. The scene that I chose for this illustration comes toward the end of the book, when the children are reunited with the fox Cooroo, who helped them in their adventures, only now they have to win Cooroo's trust back, since after their return from the land of fairy, he no longer remembers them. Oh well, the important thing is that I created an illustration that I'm happy with. The problem with trying out so many variations and doing so much experimenting is that, unless you write down every step along the way, you'll probably never be able to duplicate the exact same effects and look. I did lots of experimenting until I finally got to a version that satisfied me (lower color image). Once I was happy with the image, I saved it as a tif file, opened it in Photoshop and ran the image through some third party filters (Permanent Press's Mister Retro and Machine Wash) and a few that come with Photoshop. To make the dashed lines, I used a calligraphy pen brush and then used an eraser brush to erase parts of the line. I primarily used the gouache brushes, but I also used the scratchboard tool and a calligraphy pen for some of the line work. First, using Corel Painter, I did the painting that you see in the upper right. The style I went for was heavily influenced by Jim Flora, the illustrator of many cool album covers from the 1940s and 50s and then later, children's books. I decided to keep my depiction 'G' rated, so I went the costume route for my characters. At the end of the festival, a large wooden sculpture of a man is set on fire, hence the name 'burning man.' I've never been to the festival, but I know people who have gone and I even have one friend who is such a regular attendee of the festival that he considers himself and his wife 'burners.' I have seen lots of pictures from the festival (try Googling 'Burning Man' and you'll come up with hundreds of photos) and one thing that you see a lot of in the pictures is nudity and body paint, but there are also lots of people in outlandish and imaginative costumes. That idea was to do a funny depiction of the 'Burning Man' festival that is held every year in a dry lake bed in Nevada. I couldn't quite remember how the lyric went either, so instead of wasting time trying to track it down, I decided to go with my other idea. The first was to illustrate something using the phrase 'burning desire,' because it's something I recall from an old song, the name of which I've been trying to remember (unsuccessfully) all week. The word for this week's 'Illustration Friday' is 'Burning.' This doesn't happen very often, but when reading this week's word, I immediately had two ideas. I then did a variation of it where I further restricted the color palette and added some text.ДЄt the bottom, you can see my original digital pencil sketch, that I drew in Corel Painter. I then saved the file again as a photoshop file and finally opened it in Photoshop where I ran it through a Mister Retro Permanent Press filter to give it the look of an old image that's gone through a printing press.

I created the shapes in Adobe Illustrator, saved the layered file as a photoshop file, then opened it in Corel Painter where I added some line work. I was going for a graphic look, with a minimal color palette. I tried to make my illustration look like it could have come off of a magazine cover from the 1950s or early 1960s. I've been so busy getting stuff ready that I had decided I would skip 'Illustration Friday' this week, but then I began thinking of ways that I could combine a Christmas image with this week's word which is 'Sneaky.' What child hasn't thought of sneaking out of bed to spy on Santa putting out presents? If caught, I'm sure their parents would tell them that they were being sneaky. I'm going to be a vendor at a local craft and gift show in a few weeks and I've been trying to come up with Holiday card designs that I can print on my inkjet printer. First off, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you are all having fabulous feasts and getting stuffed.

Mister retro machine wash water color