#inktober

Every year artist all over the world take on the InkTober drawing challenge by attempting to do one ink drawing per day. This time I worked on my inking skills. The starting point to my creative journey was through comic books well over three decades ago. Most of these were black and white, with shades and textures achieved through inking. Whether it’s nervous lines of Jeremiah by Hereman, cross-hatches in hyper-real Bluberry by Mobeus, Kirbys bold hero inks, Buscemis’ energetic, flowing lines on Conan or the subtlety of line in Alan Ford by Magnus these works have seeded themselves in my imagination from early days. Since going digital, as most artist have, there has been a nostalgic renaissance for real materials exemplified in inktober.

At the heart of it I am an animator: so the project will be composed into an animation. exploring the compositions for todays mobile market, moving away from the widescreen 16:9 ratio.

As parameters and restricted palettes encourage creativity I set out a few ground rules:

The characters would have an overall dark theme as October has both Halloween and Dìa de Muertos.

I would only use black ink - this will concentrate on shapes, negative spaces and lines.

All the assets would be created ready for assembly, so they would appear like cut-outs and could work in real life.

I would only use a rigger brush for line composition and a heavy dose of cross-hatching with pen nibs. - this would keep the hand made feel once digitised.

.I would respect the platform keeping the produce at 1:1 ratio.