Cara on

Unedited scans

Felt like sketching a few more of these goofs and dusted off my Huion light pad earlier in the week. Amazingly it still works, I should really use it more often, this thing is great! Anyway, I had a few roughs left over from my alien day stuff and got to work dividing up some A4 bristol. Really looking forward to inking these traditionally over the next few days when I get a chance.

Like so many others this last week I also joined Cara:

I’ve been generally dissatisfied with my experience on social media for a while now, it’s increasingly more difficult to just see great art without the continual interruption of ads, meaningless video content, etc.

I’m lucky that I don’t depend on these platforms for any kind of income and I’m just on there to post the odd sketch and add a wee comment here and there. So far Cara is a good space just for that and it looks like more and more of my favourite artists are moving to the app.

In other news my web host is closing so I’m gonna have to think about what I do with this place. I enjoy having a web site if for no other reason than to have an online sketchbook/diary of sorts but the visitor numbers don’t really justify it’s existence.

If you’ve any recommendations for affordable shared WP hosting in the UK, let me know in the comments, it’d be real good to hear from ya!

Alien Day 2024

Only a month late this year, not too bad I guess and lets face it, kinda customary at this point. Started doing #alienday in 2019 and my approach to these creeps changes each time… still haven’t quite figured out that tricky Geiger anatomy but love adding all that unnecessary detail.

Some bonus sketches messing with proportion and design, pretty happy with some of these.
Very quick colour rough using a marker, prob won’t spend any more time on this.
Rough layout with spotted blacks.
Initial pencil roughs scanned from my wee A5 sketchbook.

There ya go, another year, another #alienday, even came pretty close to finishing an actual page of comic art!

April 2024

Quick fanarts… scribbles, playing with tone
Slapped some quick tone on these scans too

Prettay good

I originally drew this head shapes page over a couple of weeks in May 2020. It was unplanned and started as just a small A6 canvas to practice using the real g-pen in clip studio paint. It’s always kinda bugged me that it’s a ridiculous size for print and I’ve considered redrawing it larger a few times since.

I’m still trying to get better at inking over blue line so thought I’d enlarge the head shapes page to A3 and give it a go.

I tackled the low stakes stuff first, initially inking with a carbon pen but it felt a little stiff (I was gripping the pen too hard, wearing out my wrist). I switched to a Pentel Arts Duopoint Flex pen that I picked up in Poland a few years back, it’s double ended with an ultra fine nib and a flexible brush. The lines went down much smoother and I was getting a nice variation between thick and thin. The only drawback, it’s water based, something I realised when I used the posca white paint pen for highlights. It looks like the posca pen also irritatingly mixes with the water based cyan ink from the printer too.

Some WIP photos from the drawing board
Unedited scan
Final inks – surprisingly it’s pretty close to the original from 2020

March 2024

The tippy top
Inks over pencils posted earlier this month.. I mostly prefer the pencils
A page from the wee sketchbook

Nada

I drew a wee terrapin… I think I had some as a kid

Nothings

The obligatory self portrait… feeling great
Someday soon I’ll get sick of drawing skulls with high foreheads… but it is not this day
A wee inking test using posca markers (grey added in CSP) – leave a caption in the comments to win a no-prize
Some post-it ghouls from the sketchbook… oooohhhhh aaahhhh *cough* oooohhh
Prefer the rough pencils for this, oh well
Served this guy at work and had to sketch his sai tattoos, he now lives in my head as a fixer for the occult
I’ll eventually get round to my MarvelUKtober stuff again but here’s a Digitek tease

Pen to paper

I tried out a Tombow brush pen this week and it’s pretty great, nice line variation from thick to thin but just a little too chunky for the small stuff. I added some details and hatching with a carbon pen and some uni-pin fine-liners. After scanning and removing the blue line, the carbon pen lines are much clearer than the uni-pins. It’s also much easier to ink with the carbon pen, something akin to a dip pen without all the dipping.

10 Captain Britain

Tried something a bit different for Captain Britain using the symmetry ruler in clip studio paint. In hindsight looking at my initial roughs (below) I probably would have had more fun with a heroic/action pose.

09 Death Metal

Day 09 of #marveluktober is the ever so shiny and somewhat homicidal Death Metal! Believe it or not I attempted a version of this on paper and spent about an hour on it. Needless to say it did not work out so I quickly sketched up something in clip studio paint before going a little OTT with the texture. Some of it works I think… I mean I like the thumb print brush stuff in the background.