Well. So much for my good intentions for this blog!

It hasn't been a complete waste though. Besides the Xmas holidays etc, I have been busy with my drawing. I have, in fact, completed *two* three-page comics about to be published in a couple of different anthologies. Learning happened greatly in the course of this (nothing compared to that of those actually putting the anthologies together, I'm sure.)

The first piece is a short off-shoot of my long term project. It is a touching tale about a skeleton and a sheep. It will be interesting to see what comments I get once it's published. In the meantime, here is one panel from the story, broken into steps.

Step 1: Thumbnails.
This image is barely 2.5cm square (1 inch). The merest scribble to get my idea down on paper.

Step 2: Pencils.
Time to draw the actual scene. I try to get as much details on the important parts as I can with my pencils, knowing the bits I can add during the inking.

Step 3: Inks.
Adding black. This is always both fun and scary for me. I'm still not overly confident about laying down large areas of black - I know that my blacks are spotty, but I'm practicing and trying to amend that. I used both brush and pen in this piece.

Step 4: Flats.
After scanning the inked drawing into Photoshop, I've put down flat areas of grey (the anthology will be published greyscale).

Step 5: 'Colour'.
This is where I add shading and definition. This was tricky for this piece, because it's all grey and sunset/night-time. I could possibly have gone darker, but going too dark didn't suit the tone of the story (trust me!). The last step would be adding the lettering, but this particular panel was silent.

And that's that! I'll show a bit of my other story later.

I've redrawn the coin camera, and put it in context against a scenic view. Very simple line in the background, focusing on the cameras. I'm doing a small series of these, using objects or ideas resulting from the random nouns and setting them in front of the same landscape (which happens to be part of the view from our house).

I'll colour them too. Eventually.

I've used a Lamy fountain pen with these - I can still get a small variation of line with the pen, and I do like the feel of the ink as it hits the paper (as compared to a fibre-tip pen, for example). The ink in these pens does brown after a few years, but it's still not as fugitive as some of the cheaper fibre-tips! I still need practice with a dip pen - I think one of my problems being left-handed, is that I seem to catch the point of the nib in the paper quite often. The Lamy pen has a rounded point that avoids that.

I've been a bit stuck lately - really wanting to move on, but totally lacking in motivation. Where to get inspiration? Well, what I did was apply an old brain-storming technique - take two random nouns and link them together in some way. For my purposes, concrete nouns are best, though if only one of your random nouns is concrete, that still works. Once you have your nouns, sketch the results of your imagination.

On a side note: I found it quite hard to get these random nouns! A non-tech way is to randomly flip through a dictionary and stab at a spot, then take the closest noun. Very slow though. I did a search through the Internet for a random noun generator, discarding any you had to pay for - why feel guilty that you had to use the generator because you'd paid for it? Way to stifle creativity.
I found two I could use, both for random words, but letting you choose the category. The first one, TastyLamp is one that builds up its vocabulary by users adding words to its database. Some of the words can be a bit strange, and I don't mean obscure!
The second, Creativity Tools has its own database, and you can choose the complexity of the word you get.
I'm sure one of these would be relatively easy to write for a computer programmer, given easy access to a suitable database! (hint, hint)

The first result I had using this method, was camera/coin. The result is up above. After a few more combinations, I found I was not only sketching, but writing a lot too, and firing up more ideas and off-shoots.

Clowns - supposed to be funny, but more often than not, creepy. The make-up, meant to emphasize their own features, becomes exaggerated, a parody of a person. And although small children recognise and relate to large facial features - the big eyes especially - I'm sure many of them get overwhelmed and frightened by the clown creatures. I don't like clowns myself, and I don't know how that happened. Their antics are funny enough. But that make-up...

The fear of clowns is called coulraphobia. :)

I've been away, and now I'm back. And I've learnt something very important... ;)

This I developed from an old pencil sketch I found, that I had done years ago. I played around with colouring it, and trying out making a wallpaper with it.

The texture in the background I scanned in - it was originally the varnished paper-tape surround from an old silkscreen that was being refurbished. It has the most beautiful colours (altered in the wallpaper, sorry); layers of amber-brown varnish, with flecks of green that make it look almost like some strange verdigrised copper sheeting.

I've added a file if you want to download the wallpaper for your computer. Image size is 1280 x 1024 px.