skydiver

This is one of my favorites on a number of different levels. First, it shows complete, abject TERROR!! What kind of an idiot purposefully jumps out of a perfectly good airplane 10,000 feet above the ground?? (oh, wait, I did!) Then, of course, the cool, suave demeanor of the instructor counters all the terror. Oh, he is soooooo cool.

Yep, I did jump out of a perfectly good airplane. But it was my daughter's idea!! She had set up the whole thing. All I had to do was show up. 30 seconds of FALLING. When we finally pulled the chord and released the parachute, the harness yanked so hard that I had a high voice for the next 45 minutes. Then, of course, my cool, suave instructor, who was attached to me, decided to spin us around in circles. I replied under no uncertain circumstances that was not acceptable behavior!! So, the final 5 minutes of my float were a wonderful sight-seeing experience on a beautiful day outside Eugene, while recovering from motion sickness. We could see the coastal mountains to the west, and the Cascades to the east. By the time we reach "terra firma", I was exhausted!!

This was drawn with pencil, which afforded a wider variety of tones. Rather than working with simple lines, I could create shades. This is really fun to create shadows, wrinkles, and more depth of field. The difficult thing about pencil drawings is that they are hard to copy. So, when we did this calendar, we had to print every page directly from the scanned image because the printer was all that could get the nuances of pencil. I will be posting more from this calendar later as I really liked the effect.