Posted by Amanda on Aug 01, 2024
Hi Friends!
Here's some process photos from this months spot art collection. One of the requests this month was for these ghostly moon knights, so I was thinking about lots of trailing fabric & round moon designs. In this first picture you can see the very messy pencil sketch I started with before inking. At the sketch stage I'm mostly thinking about how to compose the image so that all the forms are in balance. Sometimes I'll sketch things in more detail but I think that my linework is better when I have to improvise & figure things out as I go.
This is the finished ink drawing. I use sumi ink (you can get it in a big bottle cheap) with a dip pen and very small brushes for the all black areas. Sometimes I will use a brush for the whole piece- you can draw very fast with a brush, and get a really wide variety of line weights, but I find brushes much harder to control, because they are so soft you can hardly feel the paper as you draw. I go back and forth on which I like best.
At this stage of the drawing I just have to take a photo and put it in the drawing program I use (clip studio paint) to adjust the colors so it's just black & white, and clean up a few spots. Here's the finished drawing (& some more):
In other news, check out a preview of a new mothership background by Joshua Justice that uses one of the borders I posted earlier this month:
I love seeing something I made transformed like this! Its really exciting. When I drew this I was afraid maybe there wasn't enough room inside the dragons for a title but this looks so good. I've only done a little bit of layout work (enough to know how hard it is) so I'm always so impressed to when someone gets the text & art to come together so perfect. The background will be up on Itch soon!
Hope you are having a good summer,
Amanda