OH! MAD HATTER'S MAD HEART! THE TRANSACTIONS AS FAIR AS FAIR CAN BE!

Post-inktober debrief

I wanted to do a bit of a post-inktober debrief, seeing as this year’s one meant a whole lot to me. Duncton Wood was a book given to me by my Nanny Mollie when I was in my early teens. She knew I liked Watership Down and everything animal, and I believe she found it in a charity shop and thought of me. She was a top nan. I’d read the book many times before starting this, and it’s actually one of a trilogy (although I’ve only read the rest of the trilogy once, as the books stand very well on their own) and there is another trilogy set in the same world which I actually haven’t read yet, so that’s on the menu (I’ve owned them for a while!) Anyway, onto the retrospective comments.

I tried a variety of tools for the project, starting with my preferred fine liners (a very thin permanent ink pen) with watered down Indian Ink painted on with a brush, moving on to a brush pen (thicker lines, but wonderful to draw with) and ending by trying out some copic markers (about £4 per pen, they are like drawing with highlighter pens but in many different colours, and they have a thick tip as well as a thin tip)

As to style, I found it constantly changed throughout the process. Crosshatching, stippling, ink washes of varying intensity and contrast, fine detail, total minimalism, weird borders, filling up the entire page, realism, anthropomorphism, caricature. This was on purpose, as it was interesting to me to not be confined to any particular style during the process. These were never intended to be any kind of final rendering book illustrations, but an exploration into finding a style that I /may/ choose if I were to illustrate the book for real. One thing that did stay pretty constant was the tiny white eyes, which I decided on after day 2. While moles aren’t entirely blind, their eyesight is pretty bad, but eyes are such a part of how I draw that I didn’t want to remove them entirely!

What I did find from the project was that I didn’t really have a defined way of drawing each character, having not started with any sort of character design or reference sheet (which is what I usually do before beginning any sort of character illustration) - to be honest, this is what has always stopped me from starting this project in the past, as it seemed quite a daunting feat! Working this way has actually given me an idea of how to differentiate the moles and I think I’d find it far easier now to work with the character design process. (Mandrake was my favourite design, although I loved Mekkins’ eyebrows and Rose’s roundness)

I definitely preferred the results of drawing in a mixture of fineliner with a slowly built up wash of inks (such as in “deep”, “run”, “crooked” and “squeak”), although I loved using that brush pen and really enjoyed the results of “mysterious”, “filthy” and “united”. “Fall” had a nice mix of the two ink pens with a very faint wash of ink that I really enjoyed. I think I still need more practice with the copic markers, as well as a lot more colours. Moles look so much nicer in a warm brownish grey, like the dirt around them!

The images took between 1-4 hours to complete. During the first half of the month when I was posting one every day, I was working very detailed and they were taking far too long. It got to a point where I got overwhelmed and fell behind. Thankfully my friend Megan’s idea of putting our Drink and Draw groups’ images into a gallery showing gave me enough of a deadline that I was able to spend a weekend getting back on track. I love a good midpoint deadline! (This is probably why I didn’t do so great at uni - being told to go off and do a 6-month project without any sort of midpoint deadlines really messed me up). After that, I didn’t let them take too long and stopped worrying about posting every day. I let myself catch up and even get ahead on the weekends so I could focus on work during the week.

The comments I received helped push me to complete these. I adore when people say anything to indicate they’re enjoying my work, and although I was doing this for me, sometimes I don’t care about myself enough to finish things. But I care again when I see other people care. So thank you to each and every one of you that said anything to me about these, it truly meant the world to me.

I have learned a heck of a lot participating in this years inktober, and I intend to do it again next year. I’m already buying more supplies to try out based on what I’ve seen from other inktober artists. I wonder if I dare tackle Watership Down? I kind of feel it’s had enough art dedicated to it! I’d love to do His Dark Materials, although my people drawing skills aren’t so great. Maybe that’s the time to improve them. We’ll see :)