Stinker (Ink)
Updated: Jul 23
I've had a bit of a challenging year, and it's been essential for me to find deeper meaning in my circumstances to help me embrace life more than I have in the past. One notable challenge has been to learn to manage anxiety, something that I either couldn't name in the past or else just hadn't felt to the same extent that I have recently.
In light of that, it felt great to create something a bit more whimsical. I'm calling it Stinker. (Update: the color version of this one is done! Check it out here.)
For some reason, I had really been itching to draw some exotic mushrooms. I don't know if I'd seen someone else's drawing of mushrooms or maybe just photos of them, but somehow the idea got lodged in my head and needed to work its way out.
I wasn't sure what form I wanted them to take until an Inktober prompt for "sour" got me thinking about something that would taste or smell sour, and that process brought this smelly little mushroom turtle to mind.
The drawing itself happened pretty fast. It's on a smaller piece of paper (8.5" x 6", same size as my Moonlight drawing), and I basically pulled four photo references together and then made some tweaks. Here are the four photos I pulled from:
Side note: I've been following David Petersen's art lately (known for his Mouse Guard comic) and I LOVE his drawing style. I recently discovered that Petersen has a creative process he calls 'draw the extinct' where he takes photo references of different animals and mashes them together, so that served as the inspiration for this.
I chose to lean into a drawing style that is free of hatching and contour lines and I love the clean style for friendlier images like this, as it feels like fable illustrations to me.
As usual, I inked this one using a crow quill and brush with Winsor & Newton black Indian ink. Here's a quick timelapse of that process.
The color process is underway for this guy now, see you back here in a couple weeks for the final version!
Comments