I have been really busy with admin over the last couple of days, so I’ve not done much by way of artwork. The Birds of the Appalachian Trail birdwatching logbooks have safely reached their destination – always a bit nerve-racking – and I have a copy here so I can see how it looks. I am always too scared to look at a new book for a while but my best friend scrutinised it with his lawyer eyes and only found one typo so, yay! My paternal grandfather learnt to knit when he was ill with TB during the war, and he always said that a slipped stitch let the bad spirits out, so I adopt the same approach with typos. It shows it’s been made by a fallible human, right?
So, to give my brain some help with inspiration, I’ve been joining in with some Inktober livestreams on the Sketchbook Skool YouTube channel. They are a fun way to feel like you’re all drawing together, and although I missed the start, I hastily scribbled with my dip pen and grey ink for today’s prompt: Trunk.
The last one I did was Day 12, Shredded. I started with the idea of tattered clothes, which led to the idea of a street urchin, and when I looked for some images, I found a lovely one of some Victorian boys dressed in ill-fitting coats and trousers, and decided to draw them despite the lack of actual tatters…I reckoned they still looked sufficiently ragged to satisfy the prompt. For this one I used my dip pen and ultramarine ink, which for some reason had gone really gloopy so I had to water it down.
I do enjoy emptying the nib by splattering ink all over the page!
