Inktober 2013 - Tumblr Posts
Inktober - day 1
Oh dear, Spider is so horribly off-model I almost didn't post this! But that didn't seem within the spirit of the challenge. Looking at all the other Inktober pictures showing up on my dashboard I already feel a little inadequate! I will try harder!
In other news, I will be at the Bristol Comic and Zine Fair this Saturday with my pal Sammy Borras! Please come down and see us! We'll have a new issue of What's the Time, Mrs Woolf? and Sammy has a brand new comic about zine-making in space!
Inktober - day 2
Are there even any pictures of Nat on this blog? I hardly ever draw him anymore even though I love him very much. He's one of my oldest characters, I think I made him up when I was 14 or so.
I haven't used ink wash in forever either, I am out of practice!
Inktober - Day 3
Meet Sweetpea, a tree fairy. His ears grow and fall off like the leaves of the tree he belongs to.
This is that method where I draw in a water-soluble ink and then paint over it with water. It's nerve-wracking because I could always be about to ruin a perfectly good ink drawing! Does anyone know any other illustrators who work/worked this way? There must be some but I've never found any.
Inktober - Day 4
It's Tabitha and her as-yet-unnamed cat! I did this with a brush, which I don't do very often. I think I need more practice, good thing there's still 25 days to go.
Inktober - Day 5
I felt really bad about Spider being so stupid-looking in the Day 1 picture, so I drew him again. Then added Nettle for good measure.
Also I discovered I have no purple ink. I had to mix it myself like some sort of savage.
Inktober - Day 6
I got a bit carried away on this one. I thought 'I haven't inked anything with gel pens yet this Inktober,' and then 'I should draw more backgrounds too!' and failed to realised that I'd just decided to cross-hatch a full illustration until I'd already done the line art and was trapped!
Louise is skulking around her creepy old house.
Inktober - Day 7
This one is based on what one of my colleagues imagines my home life is like.
I've used this technique for concept art in the past. It amounts to doing a sketch with a brush pen, trying to shade it with a smaller pen, then hating it and just scribbling on it and putting water all over it until it looks vaguely acceptable. It usually ends up... adequate.
Inktober - Day 8
I thought since I love my kuretake brush pen so much, I should try using it for something other than just filling in black areas. It was hard to draw fine lines though. It was also really hard to get their proportions right, Violet is so much smaller than Meruch that it's easy to draw her looking like a child. Although maybe a small, cute adult would look like a child standing next to a freakishly huge alien.
Violet wants to know how Meruch got the 'lightning flower' on his left side.
Inktober - Day 9
I doodled up an autumnal witch while chatting to my sister on Skype.
Inktober - Day 10
This one was an experiment that went kind of wrong. I need more practice with both brush inking and ink wash.
Inktober - Day 12
I'm drawing Spider a lot this Inktober, it seems. This is probably the only thing he does that could be considered inappropriate use of his psychic powers - he puts people to sleep.
Inktober - Day 13
I was also very tired after getting home from the Cheltenham Small Press Fair, so I quickly doodled up some more house hobs. These are Poppet's friends, who appeared in The Music Cupboard. They're all hobs, but I think only Poppet currently has a house to take care of.
Inktober - Day 14
I remembered why I don't draw Nat very much - he's really, really difficult. But that's no excuse! So here he is again, with a cruciform, which is a slightly questionable artifact to be using.
Nat tries not to use black magic, but it comes very naturally to him.
Inktober - Day 16
When chatting to my little sister she said she thought Violet was kneeling down in the previous picture of these two. So I thought I'd draw a height comparison to show what's really going on.
Violet is right on the bottom end of the normal range for humans. Vrega are generally bigger than humans anyway, and Meruch is big even for a Vrega. Next to each other they look like an adult and a child, although they're both fully-grown.
Inktober - Day 17
Further ill-advised adventures in ink wash. Originally I was going to cross-hatch it, but then I realised it was already past 10pm and thought better of it.
Lottie's reflection isn't always pleasant, but she likes the window seat anyway.
Inktober - Day 18
This didn't come out as well as I'd hoped, but never mind. Ink and water can be like that.
If you had the right tools to separate it from him, Nat's shadow would be a powerful (and dangerous) magical artifact in its own right.
Inktober - Day 19
Unlike Spider, Nettle fairly frequently makes inappropriate use of her powers.
Inktober - Day 20
"It's nice to talk to you without being able to see up your nose."
Violet is ill and often tired, so it's not unusual to see Meruch carrying her around the ship. This also makes having any sort of conversation a lot easier.
When I told my sister this part of the story she said 'I wish I had a giant alien to carry me everywhere'. Don't we all, sisso, don't we all.