Jeff Crosby

I recently created these four illustrations for Faces magazine. They are all Aesop’s Fables with a modern twist in the imagery. This first one is City Mouse and Country Mouse. I am continuing with my experimentation with watercolors and colored pencils and am pretty happy with the results for this piece.

Up till this illustration, I had only used a yellow wash for the underpainting when using this technique. Because this image depicts mice in a dark hole, I thought I’d try using a blue wash. It worked pretty well. This fable is Belling the Cat. The moral is: mice look ridiculous in WWII uniforms.

For this image I used a pink wash because of the sunset lighting. I’d never heard this fable before. Something about an ape and a fox traveling through a cemetery and the ape bragging about his dead ancestors. The moral is: don’t ride with a driving chimp.

I used a mauve wash here and don’t think it was as successful. However, I do like the simplicity of the line drawing for the cityscape and distant crowd that I was playing around with here. This fable was about a fox losing his tail and trying to convince all of the other foxes to cut off their tails so he wouldn’t be made fun of. The moral is: mauve doesn’t make a good underpainting.