How To Week One

Hi, friends! This How-To project is a part of my Studio 2 contract -things I have to do to engage myself in social media"; so I will start with this simple ink sketch I did last night. It didn't turn out the way I wanted it because the original size is 11x14 in then I cropped it because I HATE the rest of the illustration. I don't know if you find this interesting or helpful but shoot me a question or a critique or whatever if you feel like to :).

1. I forgot to take a pic of my original thumbnail for this piece but I felt like drawing Hellboy so there's the pencil on the left.

My pencil is not actually tight because usually I ink my own stuff. But I am trying to be as concise as possible because in the past, I have the tendency to cover lines with more lines if my outlines are not clear enough.

2. I started inking the text balloon first with #2 brush --I used my brand new Loew Cornell 7202 here because my Escoda and Raphael have gone haywire after a good quarter. I am very light-handed and thankfully am kinda steady too so I have NO problem pulling a long straight or steady curve. Then I went in with Rotring Rapidograph 0.25 for the outline of the word "HEY!". I know I will black the white space anyway but I really want the letters to be very crisp and exact.

3. I used a French curve to define the outlines of each letter and after I inked the empty space, I went in once again to redefine the outlines because I messed up a bit here and there.

4. I finished the tail with my #2 brush and I was kinda happy with how crisp the letters looked like.

5. Most of the times, I love using brushes because my ink lines can be more angular than my pencils so using the brush helps to soften them up. If I am using tech pen or my Rotring, the angularity will even be more protuberant. I tried so hard to not doing too sketchy lines anymore.

6. I turned my paper now and then to keep the lines from from left to right or top to bottom. If you're left handed, your lines should go from right to left and still from top to bottom. Also, keep the lines as light and thin as possible at the first stroke and add more line-weight as you go.

Note: 

If you're light-handed, go with bigger brush like #3 because it will help you to loosen up; if you're heavy-handed, well, I think it depends on how thin you want your lines to be. For me, #1 brush handle is too skinny to hold so I usually wrap a tape around it; I need it because I have a bad habit of holding my brush really, really tight which is not good me me in the long run.

7. I finished all outline (I ended up hating them so I cropped the sketch -____-). There's some issues with Hellboy's left shoulder but that area should be black so I would cover it in black in the end anyway.

8. After all the lines were done, I erased ANY traces of pencils because I always draw with a graphite pencil --I hate the blue pencil under my inks because the blue pencil has this weird coating that will make my ink "floats" and when I need to erase something, the eraser will lift the ink because the paper doesn't really absorb the ink and that drives me nuts. I pencil like a barbarian, it's all over the paper.  I went in to add black placement and hatching/gradation  if need be -words; I am a sucker for hatching. The tip of the cigar was done by brush too.

9. More hatching on the nose --BUT less than I used to have in my previous sketches, mind you!-- still using #2 brush. Add a little bit moe lines to the side and the tip of the nose.

10. I did work on the background for this one before I decided that I HATE the medium shot and got rid half of the sketches. What you saw is me doing some big hatching with #3 brush. It does look small in the pic tho.

11. SO, I marked the area I was going to cover with textures and blacks before I went in with the bandage and stuff. Here's the trick to quickly make textures --maybe you know it already but one of my friend in Indonesia requested a how-to for it a few weeks ago:

• get a bandage roll (the kind you use to wrap cuts or open wounds)
• cut it in rectangular shape, or like maybe 5x5cm or 2x2in or whatever size you're comfortable holding
• fill it with cotton balls and make a wrap on the the top --shaped like Hershey's kiss chocolate
• holding it at the top, dip it in ink or if you're kinda neat-freak like me, I use a big brush to drop ink into the wrapped-cotton ball
• give it a few try on a piece of paper to get rid of the first super-wet-blob-of-ink and then squeeze it softly onto the area you want
• I will make a separate how-to on this because I am not sure my English is good enough to explain what I really want to say

I also used my finger tips to create different patterns on top of the bandage patterns because sometimes they could get very uniform and boring. The same technique, I painted my finger and just pressed it randomly onto the paper. Try to turn the paper now and then to differentiate the angle of both patterns. I have tried using sponge but I don't really like how it turns out on the paper so I rarely use it.

12. After I was done with the textures and I added splatter of whites. Lately, I don't feel like abusing my nibs so what I do is I take my brush, fill it with enough ink (white or black), and flick it against the lid of my ink bottle onto the paper. The bigger the brush, the bigger the blobs of ink you're gonna get. I still like the control and shapes of splatter I get from the nibs better but this technique is quick and easy if you're making con-sketches and want to look as if you put more efforts. I am also going to put a separate how-to pics on this splatter-using-lid thing. 

13. DONE with the splatter and I hate the black sidebeard jutting out ot Hellboy's jaw so I decided to remove it with whites :D. 

14. Some of the stuff I used: Loew-Cornell #2 7000 and 7202, Rotring rapidograph 0.1 and 0.25, Dr. Ph Martin's Bombay black, SUMI drawing ink no 17. I used Rotring instead of Koh-I-Noor and I like it better; the ink I use is a mixture of Dr. Ph Martin's and SUMI because the mixture of both is thin enough for my marupen so it doesn't clog the tip. You have too be careful though because SUMI is NOT waterproof :D.

Here is the final pic: