Category: My Creations 💫

I have been getting bored of the prompts, as they all have a travel/exploration theme. When I saw that today’s prompt was “hike”, I immediate knew that I would draw something related to football, simply to escape the pull to draw yet another person exploring a landscape.

Needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled with the subject (in my mind, sports are for playing, not drawing), but I think I was able to find an approach that kept me interested. I originally hated the drawing, but I did all of the texture and shading directly in ink. I really enjoy working with brush and ink; this drawing was a mixture of that and ink pen.

The prompt for this day was “passport”. My thought was a person passing between countries, and I drew a casually dressed guy hoping over a gigantic barbed wire fence. I intentionally wanted him to contrast the grossness of the fence.

Drawing the fence itself was a pain: I originally used a brush to ink that part, but it was too hard to keep the lines as consistent as I needed them to be for something as uniform as a fence. The problem with this, is that it’s hard to create depth using a line of uniform thickness, and I wanted to some dimension to convey of the scale of the fence. I was surprised that I was able to do this to a degree.

The prompt for this day was “trek”. Originally, my plan was to draw a space ship inspired by Star Trek. As I drew, however, it became a smaller ship, and soon an exo-suit. I drew the arm pieces, and got bored with all of the tech, so I decided to just have his regular legs sticking out of the bottom. I know it doesn’t make physics sense, but I like the final result.

 I don’t know if I’m catching up, but at least I’m posting daily. For this prompt, “binoculars”, I chose to work on one of my weaknesses: consistency across the same character in different drawings. It’s an essential piece of being a comic artist or cartoonist when using “Sequential Art”, as Will Eisner named it. So I used the prompt to practice it. The wink is my blatant acknowledgement that I’m weak at it.

I really didn’t feel up to drawing today, but I pushed myself. I’m four drawing behind now, and I took too long to do this. I should have sketched out something quicker. This was my second drawing using the iPad to ink. It still feels like cheating to me.

I also chose the wrong ink style for the drawing I was trying to do. Maybe because I was lazy, and looking to do something quick? I did slick, 90’s comic book style hatching when I should have done something more textured and nuanced to capture the creature I was trying to illustrate. I’m playing around with designs for a fungus-type creature for one of my stories: not exactly something you define with slick lines. Whatever. It’s done, and that’s all that I care about.

Oh, and the prompt was “exotic”. I figure that a fungus person is exotic enough by my own definition.

I’m working on catching up. Over the weekend, I worked with my best friend and partner in crime on our superhero comic book. In that work session, I finalized the design of one of the important early characters: The Recluse. To finish of the drawing session, I did a fast ink drawing to share as my Day 3 drawing.

The inspiration was “boots”. Since we were working on costume designs, and superheros tend to wear boots, I thought this fit well with the prompt.

I was working with a brand new brush, and I didn’t quite have the feel for it yet. It kept behaving in ways that I was expecting. This is also the first time in over a year that I’ve inked with a brush. Despite all that, I’m not disappointed with how it came out.

I’ll add a better scan as soon as I can get to the one at work (I’m working on getting one for the house at the moment. The prompt was “discovery, and I came up with the idea for it while walking the dog this morning. She was doing her usual sniffing, and I realized that it was just enough discovery to give me an idea for a quick drawing in ballpoint pen. Still ink.

I haven’t done this before, and it’s been at least a year since I’ve even looked at Instagram, so I don’t remember if I’m allowed to use color or not. So I played around with a little. I probably won’t do it again for the rest of the month- I honestly don’t think I’ll have time. I plan to do much quicker drawings in the future.

So what did I draw? I won’t go into the details here of the dream I had last night, but it involved my grandma. The anniversary of her birthday is this week, and it’s been four years since her passing. In this drawing, my cousin and I are picking blackberries during our annual family camping trip when we were young. Back then, we strayed away from the campgrounds to find these giant berry bushes, and picked as many as we can carry (we didn’t have a backpack, like in the drawing, but “backpack” is the universal inspiration for Day One of Inktober 2024, so there you go). When we returned to camp, my grandma saw our berries, and called us into her tent trailer. She prepared some of the berries that we gathered with sugar and half-and-half. I had never had them prepared that way before, and they were delicious! She told us not to tell our parents that she gave us the sugar and cream, and I never did, heh heh. (Sorry Mom, if you’re reading this right now.)

Something else about this drawing that’s noteworthy: it’s the first digital inking that I’ve ever done. My wife and I just got an iPad with an Apple Pencil, so I figured that I would give it a test run for this event. Honestly, it feels like cheating to be able to erase my inks when I mess up. But because I didn’t need to be so deliberate like I need to be with real ink, I was able to finish a lot quicker than I do on paper. We’ll see what I do moving forward.

And crud: I didn’t finish this post before midnight. Does that mean I didn’t do Inktober right?