After eight years living in San Francisco, we moved to Wilmington, North Carolina this past August. It was a big decision, but we were ready for a change in scenery.
Moving across the country is a big ordeal. But, after a disaster of a red eye flight with a poor 14 year old cat in tow, we made it safely.
One of the draws to coastal North Carolina were the warmer beaches. Shortly after our exhausting move, we took some time to enjoy nearby Wrightsville Beach.
Of course, this meant sketch time for me. I used a favorite brush pen and some watercolor to quickly capture the day in a very old pocket-sized sketchbook.
I started this year off with a fun project. My niece recently had a birthday party featuring a cat theme. She had cat cake, cat plates, cat napkins, and even cat-themed gift bags for her friends.
My sister asked me to design a thank you card fitting the party’s theme and who better to adorn the card then our friend, Little the Cat.
Rough Pencil Sketch
The final piece was done in India Ink on watercolor paper — with a “Little” help.
The Original Little the Cat, lending assistance
Here’s the finished piece before sending it off to the printers.
Well… life, work, and exhaustion ended my run for this year’s Inktober. I did manage three more days’ pieces, but I didn’t come close to meeting my goals. Anyway, here are my last three Inktober drawings for 2018.
Missed a couple days and decided to combine three days’ prompts into one piece of artwork. Here I combined “Precious”, “Flowing”, and “Cruel” for days 9 through 11.
It’s hard to believe that it is again time for Inktober and we’re already a third of the way into the October. This is my third Inktober and, unlike last year, I’m following the daily prompts.
This time around, I don’t yet have a story ready for artwork but, I’m taking the opportunity to practice drawing some of the characters, environments, and props that may make their way into my next project. So each day I’m using the daily prompt to inform what I’ll put my characters through.
Day 3 – Roasting
Unfortunately, the busiest time of the year at work coincides with Inktober so I’ve already given myself permission to skip a day here and there. After all, I do need to sleep.
If you would like to follow along, I’m posting each day’s artwork on my Instagram feed.
Inktober is well underway. We’re now more than half-way through the month’s 31 day challenge and things are going well.
For those of you unfamiliar with Inktober, it’s a challenge dreamed up by artist Jake Parker to help him improve his art and build discipline. Inktober has grown each year to become an enormously popular challenge and hashtag on social networks where hundreds of thousands of artists commit to creating and submitting a new piece of art each day that was created using ink.
2016 was my first year participating. It was great fun and definitely lived up to the moniker of “challenge”. Jake produces a list of trigger words each year to help & challenge creators to stretch themselves and step out of their comfort zone. Last time I followed along with each day’s keyword and produced some art that I was very proud of — drawings that I didn’t think myself capable of. At the end of the month I managed to produce 29 new drawings (I missed 2 days) to help fill my first sketchbook.
“Little the Cat” – Penciling a panel
A year later, I was in the middle of writing a comic book script and playing with some character designs with the naive hope to have a full 30+ page comic book completed by the end of the year. As I learned more about writing, story telling, and the book making process I realized I had bitten off more than I could hope to complete in a few short months.
With a few weeks until Inktober 2017, I decided to put my “work in progress” on hold and try my hand at a short story comic that I could draw in a month and hopefully have printed or published on one of the various webcomic platforms. This would be an opportunity to learn about the comic book creation process with a “throw-away” story and a lot less pressure. Inktober would serve as a motivator and set my deadlines.
“Little the Cat” – Watercoloring a panel
Now that we are twenty-two days in to the challenge, I have five fully inked comic book pages completed with roughly five pages to go — I’m doing some late editing . It looks like I may run over the allotted 31 days but the bulk of the pages should be completed.
I’m planning to scan each of the inked pages then add captions, sound effects, and speech bubbles digitally. With the addition of a title page I’m planning to have a small print run made and be able to hold my very first comic book in hand by the end of the year.
If you want to follow along, I’m posting each day’s comic panel on my Instagram feed.
