This whole SORROW theme is affecting me! :(

My new Wacom tablet arrived. I thought I'd play with painting like strokes... I'm totally experimenting so please don't be too tough on me critique-wise. Of course, I welcome your helpful instruction! I just kept painting on layers of colors and using the airbrush and smudging areas. I hate the hair, but that's another lesson to be learned...
My apologies for the sadness of the topic... I'm on a bit of a downer right now and the Illustration Friday theme kind of intensified them. No... I'm not a battered woman, but it has come close to home.

Loss and Sorrow - 2nd submission

Click for larger image. Not as emotionally heavy as my first submission... I didn't mean to upset anyone with that image but I went with my first reaction to the theme. Anyway, I wanted to try another medium/technique - here we go with the basic digital program again, but after all, this is what IF is all about! Inspired by a memory of my son losing his first hamster to time...

"Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation." - Kahlil Gibran

A Mother's Sorrow - Pencil drawing for Illustration Friday

Click on image for full view
Wow... what a switch from all those light images of "flight"... but I have been flooded with lots of images for this topic as well. (Time to cut down on those triple-shot lattés...)

The first and most acute image of sorrow for me is the loss of a child... a parent having to release their offspring, regardless of age, to death is agonizing. The tragedies in the Middle East - carbombings and wars, the tsunami in SE Asia - so many innocents drowned and battered, swept away from their families, the horrors of Africa's civil wars and genocide in Sudan and Rwanda, the predators in our own society who would snatch our children from their innocence and harm them in so many awful ways, diseases that we haven't found the cure for cutting short promise and joy... these all conjured up images of parents finding their children murdered or killed by the catastrophes that they are powerless to control. I have 3 children and the thought of losing any of them prematurely or violently makes me cry at the thought...