Sketch Charlotte

Illustration Friday is a great weekly exercise that we should be participating in ourselves. Every week a one word topic is posted and you have all week to illustrate that word and send them a link to your image. This week's topic is "Safe" and here are the entries.

This is definitely something I'd like to try one of these weeks.

I made this for my good friend, and fellow Sketcher', Matt Starnes. His birthday was last week, and we celebrated Saturday night. The party was a blast!! Oh yeah, this was colored with Prisma Marker on plain Strathmore 300 series Bristol board.

Leather Jacket Guy is owned by creators Matt Starnes and Diego Jordan.

Ok, this isn't going to look that impressive, but for me it's a personal breakthrough...

I am working on a lengthy illustration project for which I had chosen ink with gray wash as the medium. I had started by using a croquill dip pen with India ink, followed by a bamboo brush with an ink/water mixture. But I was getting really frustrated, mostly because even when I got an inked drawing that I liked, it was easy to mess up at the wash stage.

I continue to have a love/hate relationship with dip pens. Love the line they give. Hate the fuss and mess. To complicate this relationship, I have this Cross fountain pen which I got in high school:

It's supposed to be a writing pen, not a drawing pen, but the line quality is superb. Plus it's portable, and you get several hours' supply of ink before having to refill, rather than a minute or two. Only catch is, the ink isn't waterproof. (You can buy waterproof ink for fountain pens but it doesn't work very well.) So I had ruled it out for this particular illustration project. Until now...

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Here's another Halloween inspired pic.
Peace,
Herc

I know this is a bit more than a sketch, but since it's unfinished I thought I'd share it. I came up with this image on a plate that had undergone major metamorphosis in its life. First I put a random pattern down, then I etched a mishmash of faces, heads, monkeys, trees and hands into the plate. Then I saw an overall unifying face in it, and put that on the image. Then I put down another gray pattern so I could burnish all of the previous stuff back so that only "ghosts" of it would remain if any, and hopefully pull the face forward more. After burnishing some more this morning, I went in with drypoint, gouging directly into the copper with a sharp tool. But I found that with drypoint you can make a wide variety of lines and actually have soft pressure lines which don't result in lines but etchy grays. Overall I am really happy with this piece. I added a few more tweaks and am excited about what the final proof will look like. I feel like spirit of the artist I discovered in the past week -- Odilon Redon -- has seeped into my pores. This piece is gonna be in my December show at Beet Gallery. I'm tentatively calling it "Demons and Daydreams".

This whole printmaking technique certainly has me thinking about skritch-skratching over and over and over again using pen and ink even more. I'm enthused about my current comic, which is coming along in nice big abstract black and white chunks. But I think at some point I will definitely just get lost in hatching, grays and built-up blacks as an effect of my printmaking experiences. Redon, and many others (Gorey, anyone) certainly had it going on.

SO, after last thursday's meeting- and with many, many thanks to Diego, I've reworked the composition on the pinup, I think it works much better this time around... How does it stack up to the other one?

*I'd have dropped this into the comments section of the post below, but (so far as I can tell) it doesn't support image tags.

Rich/Tom: Behold the power of Adobe Illustrator.

Tess: I'd noticed that I extruded the jaw a little in the profile of the skull, but I never thought that would read as simian. Of course now that I see it, I kinda dig it. . .

Anys, for the elaboration on the process, drill down:

Decided that after I finished if for my wife's birthday, I'd post it up here too. I hope you guys dig it.

I had to knock this sexy illustration out this weekend. Thought I would share.

Also, I just gave my wife this little ink drawing I did of her.