InCharacter: Humility

Ironically, I'm posting my own illustration on a blog dedicated to my own illustrations, and this illustration is about humility.  ME I'M GREAT AT DRAWING HUMILITY CHECK IT.

Well so yes this is my mock-up cover for an issue of InCharacter, a magazine that covers a different virtue every issue (next week I'll have three related spot illustrations for the interior of the magazine).  I've really liked working on this assignment, as illustrating an abstract thought is such a great challenge.  I figured that there is nothing more humbling than going outside at night and looking up at the sky and thinking, wow, I am small.  Like really small.  But the articles also focused on humility as the ability to see--rather than how insignificant you are--the potential for greatness in others, and the interconnectedness of...life, I guess.  So, I started looking at orreries, which is the OFFICIAL name for those models of the solar system that show relative orbits using a gillion gears.  That's a fun google search.  Here are a few I found:

Image courtesy of this site.

Image courtesy of this site.