Hey guys.
Here's the end result of my first project for Advanced Inking Techniques: eight individual one-hour inkings. Basically the only rules were that we had to time ourselves -- with 10 minutes for pencils and the remainder for inking -- and we were only allowed to use brushes for large spot blacks, with the majority done in crow quill. I hadn't touched a crow quill in almost four years (it always felt like nails on a chalkboard to me), so I was a bit rusty going into this. Lemme know what you guys think.
Reference taken from a DA stock gallery.
The clock ran out as I was putting details into the tree on the left, so I had to stop. Dang it.
My new kitten, Emeril, mentioned in the chat thread a week or so ago.
A well-loved kitty tree.
Scarlett O'Hara. I ran out of time while trying to put consistent details into the dress.
My fiance, Whitney.
It said "Imaginary Figure," so I took that literally and drew a sort of tree fairy. I was watching Pan's Labyrinth at the time.
All in all, a fun exercise, and I have a bit of a better feel for crow quill now. I definitely felt a bit out of my element with not being allowed to touch a brush. Also, I meant to post this earlier, but I made a video tutorial a while back for basic brush inking techniques:
Brush Inking
Edit: Ahh, I guess the video embedded itself! How convenient!
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Something more along these lines (but with more spot black, and a bit less hatching and linework, to match what you seem to be doing with these) would seem to be a more effective way to ink hair.
I would suggest overall that you try to really push lineweight variation, and try to make your hatching look more uniform and neat. With the lady in the dress, the dark, messy hatching on her hat isn't working, and doesn't mesh at all with the bit of hatching you've done on the ribbon. On the buildings, it's kinda all over the place, too.
I think that the most effective piece here is the cat, absolutely. There's a nice balance of spot black there, and the hatching blends well between the black and the white. I think it could even look better if the "most black" areas were make into spot black areas. The hatching seems pretty good, is unified through the entire piece, and works well to denote form. Maybe you should turn the rest of these assignments into ink drawings of cats!
..I just read ND's post and realized I'm repeating her. O well.
Glad I'm not the only one who sticks their brushes in their mouth also...
Also I have to get 8 more images cranked out over the next couple days, only this time finishing them in brush (with the same topics as the original 8). I should be able to work much more quickly and get more details into those, so I'll post those once they're done.
In the meantime, I finished my next project for my other class, Digital Design Issues. We had to take an old comic or cartoon character and redesign them to appeal to modern audiences. I decided to go with Howard the Duck and reimagine him as a detective-noir style comic.
Yeah, that's pretty much Daffy Duck in drag there.
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A still life with a stone pot filled with water.
My own rendition of Where the Wild Things Are. I tried to mimic the inking style of the book as close as I could.
A depiction of the song "Mariner's Revenge" by the Decemberists. Two guys get trapped in the belly of a whale, and one is bent on killing the other.
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I think the least effective of the bunch is definitely the Queen card. I can't quite put my finger on why, but I think it's because she doesn't take up as much retail space as the other cards, so it feels a bit more empty. What do you guys think?
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That being said I love the shit out of all of them, it's just that the jack is best.
Oh, for the love of...
I can't believe I didn't do that, seriously. I just slapped myself for that one. Hehe, thanks dude, I fixed the original image so it should have the rounded corners now.
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And a closeup of the final panel to show detail:
These were all done with a brush. I've found that I've been experimenting more with dry brush techniques in this class, and I love how it looks. I may start incorporating it into my own projects after this point.
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Glad_Hatter: Yeah, I tried my best to make sense of the original lineart, but it was really a jumbled mess of hash marks and scribbles. The professor chose the page specifically because he wanted us to figure it out. Most people had problems with the leg areas, since those all seemed to just blend together into one big mass in the original. I actually messed up big-time with the character on the right -- look at his left leg (our right), those bricks are supposed to be his thigh. Whoops!
Anywho, here's the next assignment for my Digital Design class. We had to make a computer font, so I seized the opportunity to put one together that I have been wanting to do for a long time, called "Thunderous Roar:"
I wanted to make a font that looked like the voice was so powerful, the letters themselves were crumbling from the force. Both of those lettering styles are in the same font. The top is lowercase, the bottom is the caps. I mapped out duplicate punctuation in both styles onto some of the unused keys, so it's essentially two fonts in one. It's just lettering, though, without any numbers (since I figured I wouldn't need them immediately. I may add them in later on). Also, the gray on the bottom was added in separately to improve readability; the font itself is just the black outline.
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i DO like the top one. a lot.
the bottom one.. hrm... the specks are way more visible than the font itself, something i'd try to avoid when doing typo...
The lettering on the top is evenly spaced, and most of the letters don't compete with eachother in weight. It's easily read and doesn't have the confusion the bottom font does.