Inktober (removed)
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Day 18!
This is going to be another two day piece. It's partly from reference I took on my walk today and partly from imagination. It's kind of crazy because the dryness here was making the ink dry on my nib before I could even get through it. I was happy with how the inking was going and I didn't want to risk random stray marks from a janky nib, so I turned on the humidifier and thought I'd pick it up again tomorrow.
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Day 19!
I thought I would be able to finish today, but I'm coming down with something and it's sapping my energy and focus. This might turn into a four day piece. The final image is still a bit wider than this. I normally work in passes from the top left to bottom right but I kind of started working in the middle on this one and have found myself working in an outward spiral. No idea why.
On a side note, I had my first dream about inking last night. I dreamed I was apprenticing under an older Japanese pen and ink artist and he took my paper off the desk and tore it in half, chastising me for the lack of looseness in my lines. I figure I better listen to my dream mentor.
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Day 20!
Death by a thousand pine needles. Seriously, these take a long time to do. I think I can finish tomorrow.
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Dream tutor! Eeeeek....how expensive are those?
Gorgeous work. -
@andyg In my case he cost one turkey leg with heavy Montreal steak seasoning.
Now time to go try to finish this one up!
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Day 21!
Done! There's plenty of room to grow, but I'm pretty pleased with this one. More and more this has me looking forward to Slowvember. I think I'm even going to take the piece I was going to do to wrap up Inktober and do it for that instead.
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Day 22!
Flight of the Bumble-pups! I went big for the last 4 days, so I decided to go small today, back on the 2.5" x 3.5" card. This is an idea I've wanted to do for a while. I had the word "bumble-pup" in my head, but I had no idea what they looked like until now.
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Loving the Bumble-pup!
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Thanks! I wish Bumble-pups were real.
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Day 23!
The Bread Coat! When your coat is made of bread, the sleeve is never far from your mouth!
This character is for a story that I wrote years ago during a lengthy stay at the hospital. I've never done anything with it and half forgot about it until yesterday when I was looking through old files. I think I'm going revisit my draft and turn this into a finished story. The style is likely to change a bit since I didn't quite hit my mark with this, but I'm far from unhappy with it either.
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@jazeps-tenis there’s a book I’ve got (shout me if you want the name) which is for artists first about writing books. Lots of writing books tell you to write then illustrate. This is a bit different as you thumbnail the story without writing a thing, just draw one picture, then the next which leads on from it, and so on to the end. Then you write the words and do the rest of the story development thing before going back in and illustrating properly, maybe only keeping one or two of the originals. I did it...started with a children’s book....and it turned into a 93k young adult fiction end of last year. Still with the editor though, so please don’t ask for it...
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@andyg I'm always open to checking out different ideas and approaches to storytelling and what you describe seems in line with some of the ways I like to work.
I've found that I largely take a hybrid approach. Sometimes the story first takes form in the writing and sometimes it grows from the art. More than anything, the world and characters percolate around in my head usually for a decent enough while that I have a real sense of them, and then whichever way the little sprouts first break through, I do my best to nurture them from there.
Congratulations on that book though! That's an awesome accomplishment! I'm eager to finish out Inktober, get my portfolio made and my site up and start working on my first real book. If I could find even a fraction of your success, I'd be thrilled.
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Day 24! One week to go!
This is another story I've been sitting on for years as I worked on becoming an artist. It's part of a sci-fi story that I fully intend to do once I clear some other projects out of the way. This was actually the first illustration I've ever done of it, aside from a really rough concept piece 3 years ago, so welcome to the world Jayru (the sheltie in the cockpit).
On a side note, it was a lot of fun designing the plane. I've never done that before tonight either.
The ace pilot Jayru in his custom-built K-MKU Silverhorn.
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@jazeps-tenis you nailed that plane. Good one!
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Day 25.
The fatigue is setting in a little bit today. If I was just doing the art that'd be one thing, but I've also been devoting significant time since June with learning full stack web development and programming. It's like I've told my wife, the art and the web dev. art kind of in competition with each other. Of course even if the web development wins in the short term, the art is still the long term goal.
At any rate, this is Sgt. Stubby. He was a real dog who was in the trenches with the soldiers in World War I. He would run the lines warning of incoming gas attacks which he could sense before anyone else.
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@jazeps-tenis great seeing your style is consistent even when rendering real world. (i say this because as you'll have noticed im all over the place...just for the fun of it!)
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@andy-gray Thanks! I think this past month especially has helped me with settling into common habits of how I convey form, mass and value. Plenty of room for improvement, but if you were to show me some of these pieces a year ago, I don't know if I would have believed that it was me doing them.
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Day 26.
I thought maybe I could get this done today, but I have plans for tonight, so it's going to be another multiparter. At any rate, I'm trying to work on my atypical textures.
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Day 27.
I've never done an ink wash before, so I thought I'd pivot and have a try with this piece. Yeah, it got away from me a bit, but now that I have that first experience, I can only go up from here. Hopefully.
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It's tricky to get the ink washes to cooperate! I'm still learning that as well. Inktober is definitely an education. I like the piece.
