April 2025

Got into drawing flies in a big way this month and filled a few pages in the grid notebook (I found this Etherington brothers tutorial really useful, the proportions are trickier than you’d think).

I produced two sketchbooks using Affinity Publisher and scribbled some rough ideas for covers, layouts, etc. I didn’t end up using the cover ideas but I might do something for the next one. Ideally, I’d like to spend time drawing a new detailed cover illustration as opposed to just using existing art.

Finished off the wee yellow sketchbook with some late night sketches using black and white posca markers. I really like how they came out, the fly head especially looks great on the page.

I started a new A5 sketchbook and decided to just fill the first few pages quickly to break it in. The paper wrinkled really badly with the posca paint markers, makes scanning these a real pain.

Not much in the way of digital work this month apart from a few doodle/scrap pages in procreate.

Finally, couldn’t resist picking up this tiny guy on the weekly grocery shop, such an awesome wee fig.

Alas, poor Yorick!

Inspired by PJ Holden’s thumbprint brush for CSP I created a very simple spiral brush to play with some shading. Gotta say it’s a really nice effect that instantly improved the solid blacks on this.