I’ve been sketching in my Moleskine journal quite often on my daily mass transit ride into work. It takes about 20 minutes each way, which is a decent amount of time to sketch something interesting in my Moleskine.
I normally just let my imagination run rampant with those sketches, I feel it’s an open time to do whatever I want. I don’t fight any urges either, I just go with, which leads to some surreal and strange sketches.
Whenever I post those to my various social media accounts, I get pretty decent notice for them. Recently, I was commissioned to combine two of them together into an ink sketch, so off I went. Here are the two original sketches from my Moleskine:
I thought about inking the new versions at the commissioned size of 5″ x 7″, but since I haven’t done inks for a few months I wanted to stretch my legs a bit, mixaphorically speaking (bonus points if you know where that phrase is from). So I chose a 9″ x 12″ piece of the 140 lb. Cold Press watercolor stock that I use, and went to it.
I took Instagram photos of my process, with mixed results. I had a very nice response to each process shot, so from the social media standpoint it was great. But the phone I have took some crappy photos, so I’ll have to rethink things if I do another one like this.
Here’s a gallery of the different progress shots, from sketch to near-final art. Click on each for a larger version:
Here’s the final art, and it’s called Earl and His Accomplice (click for a large image). It was a fun commission, and hopefully I’ll get commissioned to do more “strange” inks.
Earl and his Accomplice
