It’s day one of Inktober!

I had originally planned to post a few more getting ready posts, but got sidetracked so I’ll add those photos to this post.

This year I decided that I would make cute monsters everyday, and I also wanted to play with dip ink. So I came up with the idea that I would do those monsters in Autumn Color dip inks.  I also found that these inks were wetter and thinner than my black ink, so they needed a paper that could handle the ink without feathering it, I found I liked hot press watercolor paper, I purchased some 8×10 sheets – planning to put several monsters on a page.

Traditionally, Inktober is black ink on white paper… but it is also a month-long event intended to get you inspired to draw… so I am going to do it in colors because that is inspiring to me, playing with new art supplies.

Monsters

As I stated in a previous post, I am currently playing around with drawing cute monsters by following along with the ideas presented in the book, “Drawing Monsters with Melvin and Me”. In this book, every monster starts with a shape (ie. circle, square, teardrop, etc.) for the base of the monster’s body… so I’ve come up with 31 shapes for me to do this month… some days the shapes are combined (ie. rectangle and half circle).

Today’s shape I started out easy… a circle.  I figured out last week that I prefer to draw in my sketchbook with an erasable colored pencil prior to inking.  But I found that it was not easy to completely erase the colored pencil, it looks really neat that way when the ink is black, but since I wanted to do colored ink, I decided that the second and third drawings would be in graphite (easier to erase).  So I drew it again in graphite and inked it on copy paper, then again on the ‘final’ paper (hot press watercolor paper) in graphite then inked.  I chose the color ina-ho (rice ear, ochre) for today, and I used a Maru (mapping) soft nib…

Until next time…
~nic