Inktober 2017 - Happy Hallowe'en!

Day 31 : brush inking and coloured ink

It's that time again! Tabitha and her coven are busily preparing for All Hallows Eve, when many spirits roam the village and magic is at its strongest.

In Tabitha's village some people still carve traditional turnip lanterns, while others have swapped to the new imported pumpkins, but this year her job is just to ensure they're all lit before sunset.

Happy Hallowe'en!

Part 1, Bonus Picture, Part 2, Part 3

Inktober 2017 - Part 3

Day 21 : fineliners and felt tip pens - Eventually the school agreed that Nettle should just sit out of P.E. lessons.

Day 22 : mapping pen and brush pen - "It followed us home, can we keep it?"

I was hoping for this one to have a more scary feel, but the Mirror Twins seem to be too cute and are taking away from the horror of the black dog. I'm pleased with the composition though.

Day 23 : G-pen - Tree fairies of his type don't usually venture very far from their home tree, so Sweetpea has never seen a sweet chestnut before.

Day 24 : brush inking and coloured ink - I regretted not using coloured ink for the flames on day 1 every time I opened the sketchbook, so I finally relented and did a new version of the same concept, this time with coloured ink.

Day 25 : cartridge pen - Lottie is fairly sure she shouldn't talk to the Crow Boy, but she doesn't really want him to leave either.

Day 26 : mapping pen - Sweetpea's ear frills, like the leaves on his tree, turn brown and fall off in Autumn. Also like the leaves on his tree, they tend not to go at the same time.

Day 27 : fineliners and grey pens - The next three were all done while helping Sammy at MCM! It's very hard to find time to do anything else while at a convention, so I feel quite proud of myself for not falling behind. While we were on a bus Sammy requested some more pictures of Poppet's friends, 'with a musical instrument', so here are the two we didn't see in the teacup picture earlier.

Day 28 : brush pen and ink wash - Louise's house also plays host to a slightly alarming type of house fairy called Lob-Lie-By-The-Fire. He looks a little more frightening than most house fairies, but he just wants to sit by your fire and help with the washing up.

I still can't quite believe I managed to do this one after spending 9 hours selling comics in a packed convention hall, and a further 45 minutes on a bus.

Day 29 : fineliners and felt tip pens - I caught con lurgy so this was one of the hardest ones to do all month, I felt dreadful while I was drawing it! It's also very hard to draw when one has to stop every 5 seconds to blow one's nose. Still, it looks pretty good I think.

Leilus has a lot of features he could choose as his 'I am a demon' warning sign, but the tongue is the obvious best choice because it can be hidden inside his mouth. The stereotypical spaded tail would probably be the worst.

Day 30 : ink and water - Well, it seems I finally ran out of steam and had to settle for one that I really wasn't happy with. I wanted to draw Nat one more time because it was the last day, but I was still ill and didn't have the brain power to get him on model or work out a good composition. I probably should have used a different pen too, but I'd hardly used ink and water at all! I should have been sensible and opted for something with less risk, but these are the lessons we learn in Inktober.

One of the reasons Nat keeps his hair so long is that it's usefully prehensile.

Just a Hallowe'en picture still to come!

Part 1, Bonus Picture, Part 2, Hallowe'en

Inktober 2017 - Part 2

Day 11 : fineliners and grey pen - If you didn't want to share your fancy tea with the house hobs, you shouldn't have left it unattended.

Day 12 : brush pen and coloured ink - Demons aren't allowed to walk around in human shape without at least one tell-tale feature.

Day 13 : ink and water - If only it really were just sleep paralysis

Day 14 : G-pen (and a brush for the black) - Shasta's face is not the most comforting sight to see looming over you when you wake up in a strange, dark world.

Day 15 : mapping pen (and others) - This one is a bit of a hodge-podge, it's mostly mapping pen, but I used a brush pen for the black and the effects on the ribbons, and a fineliner for the string.

A bundle of oak, ash and thorn twigs tied with red string will ward off fairies, both good and bad.

Day 16 : gel pens - Wipe that glamour off your face Trispin, Ely isn't impressed. I have a super-fine gel pen (0.25) that I rarely use, so I gave it a try for the hatching on this one. I like it but it's just so scratchy! I had to keep stopping to pick paper fibres out of the nib.

Day 17 : fineliners and grey pen - Lottie's 'friends' snuck up on her while she was reading. Partly inked on a moving train!

Day 18 : brush pen and ink wash - Isaac knows a lot of sung prayers, but he doesn't remember where he learned them. This one was partly inspired by Heikala's lovely process videos, I'd never seen someone get such a fine line out of a Pentel Pocket Brush and I wanted to try it myself. I also found a spare waterbrush pen so I've filled it with diluted ink, which means I can use ink wash when I'm out of the house as well.

Accurate skeletal hand brought to you by A Colour Atlas of Clinical Anatomy, since I was drawing this one at work at the medical library.

Day 19 : cartridge pen - I draw Lena in shiro-lolita a lot because it looks cute, but in reality she and Lucas don't have a lot of money and this old, eyelet lace dress is the only party frock she owns. This is another one finished on the train because I was determined to go to bed when I got home.

Day 20 : gel pen - Oof. This one is definitely in the 'why have I done this to myself' category. I sketched it in the morning, but didn't have time to ink it until late in the evening, and it took until 1:30am! What's worse, this sort of cross-hatching looks like absolute arse until it's nearly finished, so for most of that time I didn't even know how it was going to turn out. Thank goodness it looks okay.

Someone walking past might not see the shadow, but it's there.

Part 1, Bonus Picture, Part 3, Hallowe'en

Inktober 2017 - Bonus Picture!

Day 9.5 : brush pen and coloured ink - I convinced a co-worker to walk home along the canal path with me, and we happened to see a grey heron along the way. She knew I was doing Inktober and asked if I could incorporate the heron and some Autumn leaves into the picture for the day.

I suppose really the answer was 'no', since I always try to draw my own characters during Inktober and I didn't want to break my theme, so I ended up doing an extra picture rather than incorporating the heron into the picture for the day. She was still happy with it though. I scanned it with and without the coloured ink because I was worried I was going to mess it up!

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Hallowe'en

Inktober 2017 - Part 1

It's finally here! Inktober is my favourite art challenge of the year, here's the first 10 days!

Day 1 : brush inking - In the spirit of self-improvement I started with a brush, since I don't usually ink that way. I think it came out quite well, although in hindsight I wish I'd done the fire in coloured ink so it would stand out a bit more. I don't know if Nat needs more practice controlling it or if he wants it to run up his fingers like that.

Day 2 : G-pen - The Mirror Twins have many friends to talk to. So on this day I was out of the house from 6:45am to 10pm because I had a shift at both jobs, AND I had come down with a horrible, horrible cold, so frankly I'm extremely proud of this one just because, despite all of that, it looks okay.

Day 3 : fineliners and grey pen - This was another long day and another day full of cold, so I'm also very happy that Sweetpea looks okay in this one! I've never drawn him dolly-style before.

Day 4 : fineliners and felt tip - Franz's nosebleed is brought to you by the dire state of my nose on this day. I'd had the cold for 3 days at this point and my nose was shredded from all the tissues! I also forgot that I try not to use the same pens two days in a row, I was very tired.

Day 5 : gel pen - I think it hurts Jessie to channel lightning through her body like that, but it's the only combat magic she knows. I can't believe how well this one turned out since I was still trying to get rid of that cold and still at work!

Day 6 : fineliners and felt tip - Finally I had a day off work! It was such a relief! I realised last year I've done a version of this picture every Inktober since 2014 (in a different ink each time), so now I want to keep going and see whether I run out of ideas or ink methods first.

This year Nettle is trying to practice moving only the things she wants to move, but I don't think she'll ever be able to use her powers without some of her hair floating around. Turning the pages for Spider is by far the hardest part of this exercise.

Day 7 : mapping pen - Caspian finds it harder to hold his human shape when he feels threatened. This one was a lesson in paying attention to ALL your materials, I thought my pen nib wasn't cooperating but it turned out to be the ink, not the pen.

Day 8 : ink wash - I wanted to use masking fluid for this one but I turned out not to have any, so instead I just had to be really, really careful painting around Louise.

Later in life she will know better than to follow the forest lights, but when she first moved in with her foster parents she didn't know what they were.

Day 9 : gel pen - If you pick a magical fight with Nat under the assumption that he'll be as unprepared as his sister, you will get yourself seriously hurt. I sort of wish this one had more movement, but at the time I wanted him to look more controlled than Jessie.

Day 10 : ink and water - One of Sweetpea's Autumn jobs is to bless and plant some of the acorns from his tree, to ensure its children grow in good spots.

Bonus Picture, Part 2, Part 3, Hallowe'en

Warming up for Inktober

Inktober is just around the corner (less than a week to go) so I thought I'd warm up with Nettle and Spider since they dominated last year's challenge. I haven't used my fineliners much this year and I didn't have my current felt tips at all last time, so I wanted to double-check how the two interact. I'm quite pleased.

Pocket Witch Gravity

Introducing Pocket Witch Gravity! Sammy has drawn a lot of free pictures for me recently (she's been offering commissions of things like 'you as a Pokémon trainer' and 'you as an Inkling' and I kept asking for them) so I offered her a Pocket Witch of her own in return. Gravity was very excited to meet Sammy and demanded a two-page comic to introduce herself.

The spot colour on these is actually neon ink, but that naturally doesn't show up in a scanned version so I'll post some photographs later showing the neon ink on the original pages.

EDIT: Here's the close-up photos showing the neon ink!

Bookmarks!

I promise these are the last ones! One of my favourite things about the design of the Diamonds is how huge they are, so I included their Pearls for scale (a Pearl is the size of a normal human). With these I think I got the desire to draw lovingly rendered portraits of alien autocrats out of my system, so if you're not a fan it's okay, it's over now!

Miniature Diamonds!

Here are some more of the Diamonds I warned you about! I'm usually a bit lukewarm on Steven Universe, but I find the Diamonds really interesting because of the single-minded fear and/or devotion they inspire in the other gems. The newest episodes gave them a lot of screen time so I started all these portraits in a fit of enthusiasm. (Including two of Blue Diamond because her character design changes so drastically depending on whether her hood is up or down.)

Thinking of single-minded devotion, I love Yellow Diamond's Pearl. There is just nothing she would rather do than serve Yellow Diamond, she's so proud to be her Pearl. I love her smug expression.