INKTOBER 2018 – DAYS 6 TO 12

Last week I said Plans, What Plans? It’s funny, because I had said I’d do seven ink drawings of the Thundercats this week for Inktober 2018, but after an hour of failing to find even one decent photo to draw, I decided to change plans and draw seven Final Fantasy XIII characters instead, woohoo!

In a minute I’ll talk about some of the things I learnt this week, like one way to fix smudging, but first, here’s the Drawings I did from Days 6 to 12 of Inktober 2018 :)

DAYS 6 TO 12

FINAL FANTASY XIII FAN ART

DAYS 6 TO 12

lilSOPHiE’S INSPIRED BY OTHER ARTISTS

In total I created fourteen A6 (9x14cm) ink drawings, seven fan art drawings of Final Fantasy XIII characters, and seven lilSOPHiE‘s.

You can find out more about the seven artists I was inspired by, via the following links:

• Jungon Kim • Ilya Kuvshinov • Jessica Madorran • Carlos Ortega Elizalde • Samuel Youn • Wangjie Li • Sung Choul Ham •

WHAT I LEARNT?

Last week was a sort of feeling based week, where I got my toes wet and learnt a lot about how similar to Pencil Drawing inking is, and how much fun drawing custom characters is. This week was more of a technical week, trying to work out how to Correct Mistakes and draw Nicer Fluid Ink Lines. Here’s some of the main things I learnt over the past seven days –

• Rotating the Paper while inking allows for more control
• Finding Multiple Reference Images in one go is quicker than finding one image per day
• You can’t be Heavy Handed with Ink, they respond better to a Light Touch
• Craft Knifes can be used to Fix Errors
• The X-ACTO Retractable Knife is amazing!
• Ink still takes Longer than I think to Dry
• Seeing Through works really well when Inking
• I have Shaky Hands sometimes while Inking … so much pressure! :)
• You Don’t really See something until you sit down and Draw it
• Digital drawing will have to wait until after Inktober :(
• I don’t have a clue how to Shade with Ink?

I talk about them all in the following video, including a look at my new favourite art tool, the X-ACTO Retractable Knife :) but I thought I’d focus on one topic for this blog post, so I’m going to talk about some of my Struggles Actually Drawing with Ink.

SMUDGING AND CORRECTING ERRORS

Ink smudges so easily … at least it does when I’m using them lol It’s not so much while I’m drawing, as I draw from top to bottom, left to right, to avoid my hand being on top of the ink, but when I’ve finished and it’s time to erase the pencil lines, I keep smudging them; it’s always the lil details too, like a little dot sat all on it’s own that stands out as if to say, “Look at me everybody, I’ve been smudged!”

I seemed to have gotten better lately by taking a little break once I’m done inking, and instead of sitting waiting for it to dry, I’ve started spending a few minutes to pre write out my Instagram and twitter posts lol In a way it kind of works quite well, as the ink always takes way longer than I suspect, and by the time I’ve wrote out the post, it’s normally dry.

Related to this smudging, is something that happened on day 8. I got a little too excited and put too much ink on Serah’s eye. It was fully black, “Arghhh!” I thought, … it’s related to Smudging, because I’ve Found a Way to Fix these types of Errors.

It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but as I’m using off white paper, I can’t use white ink or correction fluid to cover them, so I thought … hmm, wonder if I can scrape the ink away. Turns out you can, I pulled out a lil craft knife that’s been sat in it’s lil box for years, waiting patiently for the day it got called into action.

“Oiii…” I yelled, and out it jump. It’s called an X-Actro Retractable Knife, and this thing is so cool, I talk about it in this weeks video, but it’s basically like having a clickable pen in your hand, only it’s a craft knife. Almost identical to my favourite eraser, the Tombow Mono Eraser Pen, which is also an art tool shaped to feel like a pen. This means both sit in your hand nicely and allow tons of control.

I started lightly scratching the ink I wanted to remove, and to my surprise, it worked. It does leave a slight mark on the paper, and you have to be so gentle as I can tell if you got carried away you’d shred the paper, but from a distance you can’t really see it. I wouldn’t want to do this all the time, or on a really nice drawing, but as an, OMG HELP ME! option, it seems to work quite well.

The good thing about this is, it’s sort of had the added Benefit of Allowing me to Loosen Up a bit, as I now know if I make an error, there is at least a way to fix it. So this mistake sort of turned out to be a good thing, which I guess is what learning’s all about :)

THE NEXT 7 DAYS?

Meeeowwwww :)

So that’s it really, it’s been a week where I’ve tried to improve my line quality, but can see that will take a loooong time lol I naturally started rotating the paper though, which is something I never do when working with just pencils. With the inks it seems more Important to Draw from the Elbow for Long Confident Lines … and Rotating the Paper Helped with this. I’m still finding a lot of my lines to be shaky at times, but I can already see an improvement in my work after just a few days, so it’s quite exciting.

In terms of the Thundercats, I’m sure they’ll find a way into my art one day, seeing as I love them so much, but it won’t be the next 7 days, as I’ve decided to do 7 Realistic Ink Drawings of Animals (maybe only cats) instead :) I love drawing animals, and I’m curious what it will be like Rendering Fur and stuff with Ink.

There won’t be any copying of artist’s work either, as I’m going to draw seven lilSOPHIE’S based off some of My Photos instead :)