inktober day 15 legend

inktober and linktober 2019 continue with day 15: legend.

as you probably noticed i’m behind. and skipping around.

inspiration for the giant book that link consults is the lindsfarne bible, which i’d never heard of before doing the research for this strip.

this is the first day this year that i used a wash.

i got lazy and tired this strip. it shows in the final two panels

inktober day 12 dragon

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…