Poetry in lines and colors

I think this 1985 drawing fits well with this week’s Illustration Friday topic. “The Awakening o f Mirrors” is freely based upon a short novel by Argentinean poet and writer Jorge Luis Borges. I read this novel long time ago and I can’t remember it very well, I just remember it told about figures in mirrors invading our world and they passed through mirrors at night while every one was asleep. The first living thing that started this surrealist invasion was a fish. For the original drawing I just used china black ink on white paper using a pen nib together with a very thin paint brush. Since I found just a bad quality image of this drawing I revisited it for the submission by adding a computer touch of colour. Hope you enjoy the image!

Italy, the land of opera duets! Violetta and Alfredo in Verdi's Traviata, Puccini's Turandot and Prince Calaf, the exhilarating cats duet by Rossini and many, many others. This is my personal interpretation of this week's topic: it is a sort of intellectual duet, in a timeless setting a man and a woman are sharing some secret we are not allowed to know and behind them, in the dark background, a little window over the things to come...

Those who were kids in the Sixities surely remember long afternoons spent to play with an army of little plastic soldiers. I have never been militarist, so I didn't like those kind of games, but when I had the occasion to illustrate for a competition one of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales I chose to portrait the little lead soldier: so far from the classic iconography of the soldier and much more similar to a colourful nice toy.

The Cloud Grower. Such an old image! It dates back 1984. I was in my black and white period then... I have two versions of this china-ink drawing. The first featuring the figure of the cloud grower behind the cloud-flower vase. This is the second version and here the cloud grower turns into a butterfly

...the colour version (acrylic and collage on wood)