#inktober2022

I drew again in my small sketchbook Canson art book universal (14×21 cm / 4×6 in), using individually or together a black Pentel brushpen, Kuretake fudegokochi black pen, Sakura Pigma Micron 003 black fine liner (very very fine), Kuretake light grey Brush Writer, and a white brush pen which doesn’t work too well anymore.

For the first time since I started doing the challenge every year in 2016, I have missed days because I didn’t like these prompts. In fact it’s the first time in those seven years that I found the list mostly terrible.

Official prompt list for this year

Drawvember 2020 days 16-20

Day 16: “Cougar”

My favourite so far! I was really pleased with the pencil sketch and found myself in a double-bind: it was perfect to me and therefore was finished, but, I wanted to add texture using grey scales, or colour but was afraid to mess it up entirely. I am glad I returned to it, because the final result turned out way better than I anticipated! Grey scales were only appealing at first because this is my comfort zone. After doing only black and grey ink in October, it was like a force of habit I wanted to break. Colours, it was going to be. I love watercolours but I really like gouache too and am more comfortable with it, so that’s what I opted for. I used only four of the five tubes of Holbein Artists’s gouache I received in a Sketchbox: yellow ochre, burnt sienna, leaf green and Prussian blue (the fifth one is ivory black, which I chose not to use, using blue instead, given that blue is ideal when there is snow.)

Day 17: “Boat”

A stylised oversized cruise ship sailing at night. I used gouache again, honouring my desire to experiment out of the black and grey ink brush pens that I love so much. I used the tubes of Holbein Artists’s gouache I received in a Sketchbox: Prussian blue, burnt sienna, and ivory black. I used some titanium white watercolor from a tube to get the shades of blue and the grey. I wasn’t happy with the blue background. This has to do with the paper of my artbook which isn’t does not play well when too wet (96g/m2, 65 lb per sq. m.)

Day 18: “Planet”

This is an ink brush pens drawing of a man mounting an oversized pelican flying over a forest in a canyon, under a giant Jupiter. This is inspired from work by Moebius. I used some of the November 2020 Sketchbox materials that I received just today: sepia ink Brush Writer from Kuretake, blue and green Twin Brushes from Monami. I also used a light grey ink and geranium red ink Brush Writer from Kuretake (the latter I found way too dark), and a pale rose water colour marker from Winsor and Newton.

Day 19: “Sullen”

This is “Woman Sitting on Edge of Veranda”, a work of Kitagawa Utamaro from 1798. I used a black ink 0.05 mm line maker from Derwent and a light grey Brush Writer by Kuretake. Interestingly, I drew it before, four years ago and I looked up that page in my artbook at the time: wow, unbelievable how much I have progressed since then! Everything is so much better in this version: proportions, line work, hues.

Day 20: “Jellyfish”

I went into Drawvember thinking I should experiment with new techniques or medium I don’t use often. Today’s prompt lended itself well to that. There is a shiny quality to jellyfish that I wanted to try to render using metallic paint. Because the only such paint I have is blue I also used black sumi ink in a rectangle background so that it would bring out the blue. It does achieve that, although I am not enamoured with the result. Perhaps had I used a bit of white paint for highlights and a bit of non metallic blue to bring out the shine I might have liked it more. But I could only spare that much time for it.

Video: Time lapse of “Firecamp”

My first gouache painting and I absolutely loved doing it, and how it came out!

I used only 4 colors (of the five Holbein Artists’ gouache tubes supplied in the November 2019 Sketchbox): burnt sienna, yellow ochre, ivory black and prussian blue.

22-second time-lapse

This was part of a Moebius series I did. See the other four.