Soooo stoked to start Inktober for my 3rd year in a row!!
Last year I decided to do a horror theme, this made planning and illustrating much easier! This year’s theme is going to be *insert drum roll here* Super Heros!!
My focus this inktober is to work on figure drawing with these dynamic characters. This is also the first time I am using the inktober prompt list.
I am super (no pun intended) excited and will be posting them here and to all my social media pages, so be sure to follow me on instagram or twitter for live updates!
Completed this whale illustration I started during #artwalk & it is also available in my Redbubble store
For this piece I used Royal & Langnickel watercolours, watercolour paper & watercolour pencils (see my watercolor post for details on the pencils & paper used here), Liquitex muted inks & Fabre-Castel artist pens.
Please let me know what you think of this piece & don’t forget to follow me on Instagram or Twitter for the most up to date info on new creations & promotions!
Out of the blue I was stricken with inspiration to do some Alien fan art; I love HR. Geiger’s work, in fact I have some as wallpapers on my Mac book pro & pc at work lol
I though about doing this as an airbrush piece at first, but then decided to do an ink wash instead; once i decided this I was debating on doing highlights with the airbrush…but it’s been so long since I’ve done traditional ink (with India ink, water and paintbrush brush) in general so I decided to just stick with the 1 medium.
Ink washing is one of my favourite techniques, the last time I did any was back in October for inktober 2016 which were all relatively quick illustrations, so it was nice to actually be able to spend a bit more time on this than the inktober pieces (October is a bit of a busy whirlwind month for me lol).
I can see some things that I think I could do better but that comes with time and experience lol want to refine and improve my skills and the only way to keep improving is practice, practice, practice 🙂
The substrate used for this illustration was Canson Bristol 96lb (260g), 11″x14″ (27.9cm x 35.5cm). I have been using this for most of my illustrations lately, it is double sided (1 is smooth and the other is textured – prefer the textured side myself but its nice to have the option) and is made from 30% recycled paper #awesome
In retrospect, to really achieve the look I was initially looking for I should of used Illustration board, but I am pretty happy with how this turned out…even though I am very out of practice lol That said this substrate surprisingly holds up really well to ink wash and water colour techniques (posts to come!) with little to no warping of the paper; mind you taping this down to a board does help to prevent this as there is a fair amount of water and ink used on this piece lol but even if there is a bit of warping you can place a heavy book on top and it smooths right out!
PENCIL SKETCH
PENCIL SKETCH CLOSE UP
INKED OUTLINE
MID-TONES AND BASE LAYER OF BACKGROUND
FINAL OUTCOME
CLOSE UP
I’m not going to lie, since it had been so long I procrastinated on finishing this piece for a little while lol I was afraid to mess up my pencil sketch and inked outline so the first layer of the ink wash was terrifying lol but sometimes you just gotta take the risk, swallow your fear and give it your all!
To see more of my work be sure to follow me on Instagram & twitter @noelle_fontaine where posting happens more regularly 😛
Thank you for reading and please do not hesitate to share your thoughts and critiques on this piece 🙂
Inktober has already come and gone, it seemed to happen so fast!!
This was my second year participating in inktober, you can check out last years blog post inktober 2015, many random ink pieces were created lol I found it a bit hard to squeeze in time to get these done but I am very happy I was able to complete the challenge and work on my inking skills!
October is usually a crazy month for me (making my niece & nephews halloween costumes, freelance work, full time work, participating in the night of fear festival media promos & event itself) so I decided to get a bit more organized & go with a theme: horror & macabre movies & tv series.
Noelle Fontaine Design & Illustration 