First is a sketch of a spiky gourd-like thing that a friend of mine has on her table for decoration. Actually she has a good dozen of these baseball-sized green seed pods. I asked her what they were. She said the guy who sold them to her simply called them "hedgehogs." So if anyone knows what they are, we'd be glad to hear!
I set myself two challenges with this drawing. The first was to use a pen I bought a while ago and never used: a pen with two tips in two colors, one black and one a midtone gray. So using that was easy enough, though I need to think more about better ways to use that gray. More practice needed!
The second challenge with this drawing was to scribble the whole thing using only lines that followed the shapes of the parts, and no outlines. I have to share, I'm pretty proud of pulling that off. You can see the overall shape of this thing, but I didn't draw any outer edges! In fact, I think the drawing turned out better that way. I'm not sure such a complex overlapping thing with so many spiky parts would have turned out at all if I'd try to draw edges. Anyhow, it was an interesting experiment which I'm going to try again soon.
Next up, a funky perspective drawing I did of my nephew while he checked out his recent texts. I again used the new dual tip black and gray pen. He was a good sport, not moving at all while I captured him in these quick scribbles.
The challenge for me here, aside from simply trying to capture a human being, was moving fast, because I didn't want to inconvenience him! I find it hard to draw people who are posing. I feel so responsible for not making them feel badly with whatever scribbly thing comes out of my pen. I much prefer drawing strangers in public! Needless to say, this doesn't look anything like my nephew, but I really liked many parts of it! And paying attention to hands and shadows! My goodness, how hard such common things are to draw!
Inktober scribble #10 is a super quickie based on fast gesture sketches of ducks and seagulls hanging out in the grass of a local park. I did this with a #33 brush pen (Kuretake?). It came out more cartoon-y than I anticipated. But, dang, if it doesn't catch my happy mood about the whole thing. I really did enjoy watching them watching me, to see if I'd brought them any food. The one duck's stare continued unabated. Evidence, I think, of him living in perpetual hope. The gull got bored with me pretty quickly and returned to self-care.
And finally, for today's post, anyhow, Inktober #11 depicts a little magical realism. It is my left foot in my favorite running shoes (I actually ran in these shoes, during a brief period of insanity about two years ago). I used a Namiki Vanishing Point pen filled with Noodler's Saguaro Wine ink. This color captures the color of the shoe perfectly, but I decided to use it for the whole drawing anyhow. Well, except for the magical bubble accents in a green. I used a Pilot Varsity fountain pen for that.
I can't quite explain where the magical bubbles came from. Probably some sort of "Glinda the Good Witch" imagery buried deep in my brain. As I thought about how much I loved those shoes, the notion just popped into my head to try to represent their magical powers, and this is what came out.
I did have fun trying to work out how to represent all the dark tones and textures with one color and different hatching.
Little games or challenges like Inktober are such great creativity starters. Short, focused, intense exercises with "rules" that limit you keep you motivated and challenged and stretch your creativity to find new ways to innovate inside of the rules of the game.
Inktober rocks!
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