inktober and linktober 2019 continue with day 12: dragon

made some changes to the way i worked on today’s inktober and it really helped.

the final piece looks more like i imagined.

here’s how it went down. (if you find this sort of thing just mindnumbingly boring, here’s the color version, colored digitally, of today’s piece

here is the initial sketch

then i hunted down a bunch of reference of alex honnold climbing el capitan

i didn’t really use any one image in particular, but it helped me refine my early sketches

for the dragon’s pose i just did an image search for sleeping dogs.

all of that reference helped me refine the drawing and make it more convincing…

i think the sketch, done digitally, has a lot more energy than the final inks.

the biggest change to my work came in the next step.

i haven’t been happy with my inking at all, this inktober, so i decided to draw bigger. i’ve been watching a lot of cartoonist kayfabe lately and somewhere in there ed piskor said ‘pencil small and ink big.’

i’ve been drawing each panel at 4 x 4 inches all inktober. last night i decided to go bigger.

i resized the panels to be 5 x 5 inch and worked on 11 x 14 inch bristol instead of 9 x 12 inch bristol

inking at the larger size made all the difference for me.

i was able to vary the line weight more than in every previous inktober. it took way longer to work, but it was worth it.

it felt like a breakthrough.

now i just have to do it again tonight…