Some like it HOT on Illustration Fridays

    Hello, friends, and welcome back.  It's such a beautiful day out in the city.  The sun is shining down, it's warmed up, you know, by NY standards, and there's a lite breeze winding through the buildings.  I thought it was a great day to have a picnic lunch in the park. 😀

    This spring weather is so nice. It hasn't given into the SIZZLE of the hot Summer weather just yet, and with Memorial Day weekend (for my USA friends) just around the corner, who knows what the weather may bring.  New York City is always full of surprises. lol

    The project I pulled out from the morgue to work on over the past week or two is a note I had from 3.31.2014.  It was for an Illustration Friday topic, you guessed it: SIZZLE.  When I think of things that Sizzle, now, I think of: the hot Summer sun heating the pavement streets in the middle of the Summer, I think of the crackle of a campfire, the sound that popcorn makes right before it pops, and, of course, the sizzle of breakfast food being made on a weekend morning.  I always think about breakfast food. lol.  It surprises me that my notes were not about illustrating breakfast.  I had other food items in mind.

    I had three ideas written down for it in my note.  Since I wasn't bound to the one single-week parameters of the original Illustration Friday format, I decided to illustrate all three.  All three ideas involved peppers; peppers in action.  Speaking of action... When I was having my picnic lunch, I had brought a book on reading tarot (as I'm learning it)  and happened to be reading about the minor arcana of wands.  Wands are aligned with the element of fire and they represent action in the tarot.  Just a funny coincidence that I'd be reading about fire and action after just visually conceptualizing SIZZLE as fire and actions.

  

    The first of my Sizzling illustrations is a Jalapeno pepper doing aerobics.  I wanted each of the illustrations to be a different type of spicy or "hot" pepper, further conveying the Sizzle concept by means of the Scoville Scale.  My illustration is where Scoville heat units meet calorie-burning activities, such as exercise.  I don't do aerobics but I do an hour of cardio every day, usually.  Recently, I was sick for about 2.5/3 weeks and I had to ease my way back into doing intense exercise.  With this illustration, I really had fun researching the type of exercise outfit that they would wear and what particular aerobic pose they would be in.  I really like it when the illustrations are "just fun."  Usually, an IF illustration tends to be just that as I am not doing it for any other reason than just to have fun making art.

    The next Sizzling illustration is of a Tucador de Guitarra, which is Guitar Player in Spanish (as I was told by a friend.)  I am learning Spanish but I am slow at it and still very much in the beginning stages of learning words, etc.  I only started last January.  I'm getting there.  When I think of how certain musicians, like Spanish guitar players or Ani DiFranco or Lindsey Buckingham (some artists I know by name), and how furiously fast they can pluck the strings of their guitar when they play, I imagine that they are starting little fires on their acoustic guitars that would need to be slapped out as they continue to play.  I thought a Ghost Pepper would be the appropriate pepper for this illustration.  I really wanted this guitarist to be wearing a hat that was pulled down over their eyes, giving them some mystery.  The ghost pepper is naturally shaped in a way where I could imply the top fold of the pepper as a hat. 

    And last, but definitely not least of my trio of Sizzlers, are my Bird's Eye Chilis dancing.  I've always been envious of those who have a talent for dancing, and it's fun for me to illustrate it.  I still can't make up my mind but often, I think these are my favorite of the three.  I love the pose, and I enjoyed taking the very long stems and forming them into a heart, visually representing what the peppers were feeling at the time as they set the floor on fire.  These are actually the second set of peppers that I drew.  The first set I had drawn the same evening that I drew the Tucador, but something was just really "off" about the faces that I chose to draw.  I had caricatured the faces of the dancers from my reference image, which was ok. However, it just bugged me.  I decided to sleep on it, and the next day it still bugged me.  So, I decided to start over again, choose a different reference image and draw them again new and from scratch.  This second pair, the ones you see, I am much happier with.  I think they are the version of "cute" that I was wanting for this illustration.

    This wraps up what I have to say about these illos.  As promised, I am trying to write smaller "bite-sized" blog posts so that they aren't epic tomes for others to read while still packing a little bit of that Scoville "heat" to make them interesting.  Also, I just don't have much else to say on the subject.  No point in chewing on the peppers and then blowing a bunch of hot air. Just short. spicy. and to the point.  I hope you all have a great weekend and upcoming Holiday (for my American friends.)  Try to get out and enjoy this nice weather while you can.  I think I'm going to heat up the skillet and sizzle some tasty pancakes with eggs... maybe toss in a few peppers.  I've made myself hungry. lol :P

until next time, friends...

Keep sketching, keep thinking, keep laughing, and most important of all, keep making art. 
Cheers,
LEWIS