Here are the last of my Inktober illustrations. I had such a great time doing these and am a little bit sorry to see this year’s challenge come to a close. Drawing challenges are a great way to improve as an illustrator, as I learned awhile back when I did my first 365 Drawing Challenge. I’m already looking forward to next year’s Inktober! Until then, here’s a couple of my favorites from week four:
You can see the rest of these in my Inktober 2018 Gallery.
Happy Halloween! Even as October comes to a close, I still have plenty of Inktober illustrations to share. Here are a couple of favorites from week 3. You can check out the rest in my Inktober 2018 gallery.
So here I am with another week down in this year’s Inktober challenge. I felt like I got into a nice groove with these. It helps that I have been keeping to my Halloween theme for all the official word prompts. My first hang-up so far with that was for the prompt on day 12, “whale.” I have to admit I was completely stumped as to how to stick to my Halloween theme for whale. In the end, I decided to go for a bit of a Charles Addams approach. (You can see my solution for that one here.) So maybe not directly Halloween-themed, but certainly odd (if not potentially quite horror-filled!).
Below are a few of my personal favorites for Inktober 2018: Week 2. Visit my Inktober 2018 gallery to see them all!
Here are a couple of my favorites from Inktober 2018: Week 1. This marks my first time participating in the yearly Inktober drawing challenge, and so far I am having a real blast! I am sticking with a standard, kid-friendly Halloween theme, working from the daily word prompts compiled for this years’ challenge. You can learn more about the challenge and its originator, Jake Parker, at inktober.com. Be sure to check out all of my Inktober illustrations in my Inktober 2018 gallery.
Here’s a chubby, little, blissful bumblebee wallowing in a bed of fresh pollen. I wanted the bee to look like a fat cat getting its head scratched. My dad used to say that every living thing just wants its head scratched. One day a bumblebee landed in front of him while he was gardening and looked, to my dad at least, like it wanted its head scratched. So he reached out with a finger and scratched the bee’s head. Rather than sting my dad, it just sat there and happily got its head scratched. I like to imagine that this is what that bee looked like. Just a fat, cute, blissful bumblebee.
Below are a few images of my work in progress. I usually start with a digital sketch and once I’m happy with it, I’ll print it out. From there I’ll trace it, refining the drawing as I go. Next, I ink the drawing using a crow quill pen. Lastly, I scan the finished drawing into Photoshop and add the color digitally.
My family has never been a fan of the flowery, mushy greeting cards, preferring instead irreverence, silliness, or sarcasm. Even my wife, whose tastes lean a little more towards the flowery and sweet, understands my family well enough to know that those types of cards are totally inappropriate for us. Unfortunately, we’ve noticed an odd downward trend among greeting cards over the past several years. For some reason, they seem to have drifted away from cards that are actually funny in favor of uniform blandness. Every year it gets harder to find a good greeting card, but this year’s search for a Mother’s Day card was the worst. We went to three different stores and found nothing. My wife finally got fed up and told me I should just make one myself, so I did. I may not win any awards, or have greeting card companies beating down my door to hire me, but my mom had a good laugh and seemed to genuinely enjoy getting an original homemade card.
[ess_grid alias=”Wrong-Planet-Grid”]
A Charles Addams-style cartoon of a weary space traveler who unknowingly arrives at…The Wrong Planet! Wrong Planet was a single-page comic I did for a graphic novel class I took while attending VCU. I came across my rough pencils for this when I was organizing my art drawer a few weeks ago and thought it would be worth finishing up. I’m so glad I did! Not only was it a lot of fun, but I’m really happy with how it came out. Since most of the panels are more or less square, I went ahead and broke them up into individual images so I can post them as my first-ever Instagram comic. Below are images of the original pencils I did way back when, along with a recent progress shot of the inking done with a combination of brush and crow quill pen.
Recently, I was going through a drawer of old artwork when I happened across this four-page comic I did while taking a graphic novel class at VCU. We were told to create a super-villain with a defined set of powers/abilities. Once that was done, we were put into groups and had to come up with a story together where our characters fight. Even though we all worked on the story together, we were each left to make our own version and come up with our own dialogue. My character was The Mezmerizer, whose powers included disorienting people and projecting energy. I was always very fond of him, but never quite got around to using him for anything outside of this particular story. Overcompensation-Man was created by designer Matt Leahy, and Octo-Girl was created by illustrator Ally Hodges. Put it all together and you get webcomic Supervillain Throwdown!
I originally drew and inked the pages for class, but we were not required to color them. It was always in the back of my mind to go ahead and add color, but between graduating and starting a career, it got lost in the shuffle. I’m glad I went back and did this- I had a lot of fun revisiting these characters. Who knows, if I dig a little deeper in my art drawer, I may find a few more comics that get the finishing up treatment.
