The Magic of White Inks

I recently bought bunch of white inks and a couple black paper sketchbooks and I’m … obsessed.

I can’t remember the last time I tried inverting my normal sketching process, but I can tell you, last time I didn’t have a Gelly Roll pen on my side. I have recorded a review of the white inks I was playing with for a YouTube video that will be coming out in October (2017). So I’ll make sure to post it here once it goes live.

Until then, here are a few of the pieces I made during my white ink kick for #HorrorHaikuesday over on my blog HorrorMade.com:

#SketchDaily Week 2

#SketchDaily, illustration

Here’s all of week two’s artwork in one place for your viewing pleasure. (And here’s a link to week 1, in case you missed it: Beginning #SketchDaily).

Days 9 and 10 had the #SketchDaily prompts of “National Pizza Day” and “Spires”, respectively. The little pastel goth girl eating pizza was a lot of fun to draw. But the Spires one was a challenge. I am not as comfortable drawing architecture in a short amount of time. Hence why the weird Alien lady showed up.

What was really cool is my friend Kylie Goetz wrote a poem using “Spires” as inspiration. Here’s that poem in case you’re curious: Inkpired.

After that the prompts were “Pumpkin Spice” (For the 1st day of Fall), “Theater”, “Rooftops”, “Public Transportation”, and “Shoes.”

Pumpkin Spice is actually a portrait of my little sister. She recently moved to the other side of the country and where she’s living now they don’t have the influx of pumpkin-spiced-everything that New England does. Literally the day before this prompt I had mailed out a care package to her filled to bursting with pumpkin spiced everything. So, of course, when that prompt came up, I had to draw her.

“Shoes” turned out a lot more interesting than I had originally thought. I enjoyed playing with the forced perspective to see if I could make the character look like she was floating. And- I’m pretty happy with how that turned out. I was even happier when I found out Kylie wrote another poem using it as inspiration: Inkspired 2: Incantation

I love when we can inspire each other to keep creating. 🙂 What have you been making? Leave me a comment with links to your creations. I’d love to check them out.

#SketchDaily

#SketchDaily, illustration

I’ve embarked on a new artistic challenge and that is to do one sketch every single day for 365 days in a row. I don’t care if it’s on a napkin with my eyeliner, SOMETHING must be drawn every day.

The goal of this project is to force myself to be more playful with my artwork and to try and refine a base “style” for myself. For the longest time, since most of my work was for theater and film, my goal was to get great at imitating styles. Which, when you’re trying to recreate life and art, that skill is a must. That being said, I’ve gotten pretty good at mimicking styles and I think it’s time to refine my own. So here’s what I’ve created during my 1st week of the #sketchdaily challenge.

My go-to subject for this when I 1st dove in was portraits. They are 100% in my comfort zone. Here’s where I started:

After two days of randomly scrolling through Pinterest for faces to draw I decided to see if there was an official #sketchdaily out there somewhere. And, wouldn’t you know it? There was. On Reddit of course. After realizing that, I joined in on the daily art prompts, and here’s what’s come out of that so far: