Because of my training as a animator, my work has tended to be very line based. I’ve been trying very hard this last year to push away from that and have been exploring a process that was inspired by the work and processes of Vanessa Lemen, Allen Williams and Scott Fischer. I’ve been trying to approach inktober in that spirit, some days succeeding, some not.
Had really been struggling last week but ran across some images by Takato Yamamoto (you can find some of his work on my pinterest page in my board, eliciting inspiration). Inspired by the way he uses more abstract design elements around the faces of his figures, i did some thumbnailing in my moleskin. In my head I was thinking cyber punk meets Mucha. That’s not really where I ended up, but I felt like I got my wind back, which led to my inktober day 19 drawing.
The thumbnailing generated a bunch of ideas so I figured this was a good path to explore.
I started in my moleskin, then worked the idea up into a larger sketch.
I then taped a piece of dura-lar to the sketch and lay a gold fw ink abstract over top.
Once the ink was dry, I took the whole thing and lay it down on my light pad so I could see the drawing underneath.
Using the drawing underneath as a guide, I re-draw the image using the abstract gold ink layer to influence changes to the image.
I then went in with a brush and black pearlescent fw ink to add in my thicker blacks.
Up to this point I had been thinking to have a heart floating above her hand, but all the way along I hadn’t been feeling that was right. It felt a bit too on the nose and also I was worried it might cast this character in a more negative light then I wanted the viewer to feel. Was kind of coming up blank, so I decided to risk wrecking the drawing and experiment a bit, to see what would emerge. I lay down some water with a large flat brush then using a fine brush, touched spots of white fw ink into the water and let it do its thing. It started to look like a white flame so I went with that and refined it.
Last step was to paint in some white acrylic on the back to help pop the face, hand and flame. Inktober day 20 is done and posted to my IG! 11 more days to go.
