Creative

Inktober 2019 #1: Ring

I tried drawing a ring, like the kind you wear on your finger. It’s harder than you think. Harder for me, anyway. Then I thought of showing a phone ringing, but phones are hard to draw, too. I thought, “What is really easy to draw that also rings? A stick man!”

Well, actually, stick men don’t ring. So I improvised. Here’s my first entry in Inktober 2019, a stick men hanging over a pit of spikes on an exercise ring. Ironically, the one part I cheated on by using a shape is the ring itself.

This is actually one of several drawings I made. I spent a long time working on something else and it sucked corn dogs. Such is art.

Tools used:

  • Procreate (for the overall sketch) using the Studio Pen brush
  • iPad Pro 10.5 inch
  • Apple Pencil (the first one, which is approximately five meters long)
  • Affinity Photo for adding the ring (Windows version)

I’m doing Inktober 2019!

No, really. I’m going to do an ink drawing (digitally on my iPad) every day, using the prompts, which are as follows:

I’m going with the “do whatever I can in five minutes” approach, so there’s no huge commitment. Will it result in magic or madness? We’ll find out starting tomorrow!

And just so I don’t forget, here are the official rules from the Inktober site:

  1. Make a drawing in ink (you can do a pencil under-drawing if you want)
  2. Post it
  3. Hashtag it with #inktober and #inktober2019
  4. Repeat

Round Balls No. 12 clone found!

I came across another page of The Ever Continuing Saga of the Round Balls, this one from June 1986. It claims to be No. 12, making it the second unfinished No. 12 out there. I can’t even blame a printing error on this one. Maybe I lost the other one and started over.

This Round Balls comic is noteworthy for the fact that the Round Balls do not actually appear in it. I’m not sure where I was going with this one, but I do like the stick man. He seems very business-like.

I thought I was very hip at the time by dissing on both Nancy and Doonesbury.

My first terrible sketch in Sketchbook: Gum Gum Person

This quick sketch (that’s my excuse, yeah) was made using Autodesk’s Sketchbook software on the Mac mini, using a Wacom Intuos tablet.

It’s a gum gum person and the color is off, the lines are weird and the face/head are not in proportion (I know my gum gum people), but you gotta start somewhere.

For comparison, here’s a pair of gum gum people I drew on actual paper way back:

Gum Gum racing
It just seemed obvious that Gum Gum people would race on magic bananas.

For my next trick I will try drawing something decent. Or maybe another gum gum person.

A drawing per…month?

One of the things I did when making my resolutions for 2019 was lower the bar. In some cases I didn’t just lower the bar, I gently set it down on the ground. I wanted as little friction as possible to make progress, hoping the ease in doing so would provide sufficient psychological boost to push me beyond my terribly modest goals and reach for the sky, or at least something that requires me to stand on my toes.

One might make the argument that since I obviously know I’m trying to “trick myself” into improvement, it will never work. And that’s possible. But I like to think I’m at least willing to meet my brain halfway on this.

And so I am adding another resolution for the remaining 11 months of 2019: A drawing per month. Not one per week or day, just one every month–a modest goal that can be built on.

I have 20 days to keep pace going forward. Will I draw a blank (lol)? Find out on February 28! Or hopefully sooner. You never know.

A collection of drawings and other attempts

Yesterday was the first day of my “write something or draw something or photograph something every day” thing.

I did none of these things.

Actually, that’s not accurate. I did get out the iPad and pencil and did some sketches in Linea, none of which I liked enough to post. But then I didn’t promise quality and you have to start somewhere, so here are all of the sketches in a gallery, with commentary. Enjoy?