Autumn gets me in the mood for rich black inks, so earlier this month I started out on this piece:
I went with a kitchen sink approach to rendering; there are maybe too many styles at work that are at odds with each other. Such are the risks of looking at so many reference pictures, but I don’t regret it. I figure that what comes most naturally to me will rise to the surface over time.
Originally I had grand ambitions to make this part of a flyer or similar document, but I ended up spending all my effort on what you see here. I tried to add text (“Happy Halloween!”) one frustrating evening, but in the end couldn’t make it work. It feels somehow incomplete without the flyer and text content. I added the green color digitally to compensate; among all the other things I’d like to sort out, I’m still working on how to digitize my art well.
One of the reasons this took all month (aside from my usual scatterbrained approach) is that I made meticulous studies of some of the key figures so that I could draw them “from instinct” in the final piece. The goal was to retain the liveliness of a sketch in the finished product, a thing I tend to lose if I trace over a drawing.
Onwards to November, then!