I sketched a few Swamp thangs while on hold with my gas supplier listening to what could only be described as interdimensional flushing toilets.
Tag: Swamp Thing
I’ve been itchin’ to ink over some more blue line work since writing my Blue no more post back in April. I sketched up a quick marsh man in Clip Studio Paint and converted the line art to Cyan.
I printed it onto an A5 sheet of cold pressed watercolour paper (200gsm) and inked with a Pentel brush pen, Uni Pin fineliners and a Posca paint marker for highlights.
I got to work on this around 2pm and completed it in chunks throughout the day, approx. 2 hours altogether including quick colours in Procreate.
Overall, I really enjoyed inking over this blue line piece, there’s a freedom to it, knowing that you could just print off another page if you messed up the inks and start again without losing your original drawing.
I’m disappointed with the brayer texture and will probably need to look at using another ink next time or practice with the roller on different paper. The masking tape also damaged the page in places so I might use masking fluid or cut out a stencil overlay on any future attempts.
The Posca marker worked really well on solid black ink but tended to mix with the brayer texture and grey wash. It’s really difficult to get a good all-round consistent line with whiteout pens like this but it’s also entirely possible that I just didn’t allow enough time for the inks and wash to dry.
I pretty much gave up on the clip studio workflow to remove the blue lines after scanning, the results looked a little faded/grey and the background wash was lost entirely after edits. The technique seems to work best on clean line art only. It’ll probably need tweaked or approached from a different angle for washes/texture. One solution would be to scan the line art and then add washes/texture using digital brushes. Alternatively, washes and textures could be scanned from separate lightboxed pages and added as multiply layers.
Swamp Thing should be creepy, right?
Drawn using Frenden’s Hawley Inker Random in clip studio paint, I shaded the face roughly and then applied a motion blur before adding further texture in an overlay layer.
Benjamin AE Filby gets some great sketch suggestions:
The brush Slick Sable by Frenden gave some great results noodling with those textures and organic forms.
I wanted to expand the head sketch to a full figure and started by roughing out the layout, then blocking in the basic shapes and shading. I went straight to work on the details of the foliage, copying and pasting as much as possible, creating random in-betweens to avoid repetition.
I didn’t really achieve what I wanted from the drawing, the figure is static and the anatomy is lost in the details of the fungus, branches and greenery.
I roughed out a second layout that feels right for the character and there’s also ample space to include the background of the swamp itself.
