There’s a story behind this one. At work, snacks appear randomly in the workroom. People have accused the Clinic Manager of placing them there, but he denies being the one who brought them. What he does, though, is claim that the snacks were left there by a snack criptid. So when the prompt for today was “snacks”, I knew that I should attempt to illustrate what our particular snack criptid looks like. Of course, this is just a guess, as no one has ever seen the criptid before.
I made it to day ten! This one was a fun one to do. I never do scenery, so it used a photo for some ideas. I didn’t straight reference it, but I wasn’t also making plants and rocks up out of my imagination, like I normally do. The prompt was “nomadic, so I just put an unhoused guy traveling with his companion. When I run, I like to get away from the neighborhoods and find trails in the unincorporated lands. More and more often, I see people like this guy. I figured I’d try to capture the adventurous piece of his life.
I used a brush that was thicker than I would have liked, but it ended up working well with the mood of the scene.
With a prompt like “sun”, you knew that Krypton’s last son was the first thing that came to mind. I was not happy with this drawing at all; I pushed through the pencils, opting not to fix any of the mistakes, as it was “good enough”. And then when it came to inking, I pushed through those quickly, as well. I am finding that I am spending too long on each of these- I should be pumping out at least two a day. Instead, I’m spending more than one day on single drawings.
As an example of a mistake: I drew the picture with the intention of having a giant sun lighting Superman from bottom left corner. I messed up and accidentally put shadow too far to the left, meaning that I now needed to move the sun to the right hand corner, making it necessary to shrink it as well. It’s not fair to call that light a “sun” anymore, so now it’s just a giant light that he’s flying over.
Once I fixed a lot of things in the inks, I’m happier with the results. This is one of the few drawings that I’ve done for this project that I want to add color to. So expect to see this one return. Also, my wife suggested that I add stars via Procreate, and I like how they came out. I am also proud of the “S”, as I drew it and inked it completely freehand (no tools or rulers used).
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.
