Arsenic Lullaby - INKTOBER and stuff YOU can ink

If you go on Instagram in particular or other social media sites, you'll notice it is #inktober.

Well, actually everyone's feed is a bit different as big brother has personalized/customized all of ours to be as not fun as possible, and to be one argument after the next...until we are all so bitter and living under the illusion of being alone and in the end times that we shovel our money at big corporations to get plastic trinkets to calm ourselves...calm ourselves enough to go to work and be their slaves...you think that fiat currency they give you makes you any less a slave than if you were only being given bread and water? I got news for you, bread and water are tangible trade-able commodities, unlike that worthless paper with a president's face on it...F8ck, man, it the federal reserve decides that...oh...sorry about that, I'm just gearing up my libertarian screed for the long winter.

The point being...

My newsfeed as an illustrator might be different than yours and so you could be missing out on seeing a lot of cool stuff. If you haven't noticed #inktober yet, type that hastag in pretty much any social media site to see all levels of artist practice and show off their inking skills.

It's pretty interesting, especially because you're seeing beginners right next to more accomplished illustrators, right next to people who know they have no actual skill/talent/interest just saying "what hell, I'll give it a go".

It's fun. Who started all this? Who the hell knows. There is an "official" instagram page that has a list of "promps" that is shared all over the place that people use as some sort of starting point. with all due respect to the "official inktober" instgram page...their "promps" aren't really much help, are they?

Uhm...those are promps for things to draw. Some of that crap is pretty existential, for that matter. no.2 "mindless" no.15 "legend"...if you're just wanting to practice some inking, what the fuq are you supposed to do with that? Those would be nice promps if you needed to get the gears in motion to draw something.

...inking is a different animal.

What you'd want is a promps list of different kinds of lines, or techniques or tools to use...like say -stippling - crowquill pen - brush -dry brush OR maybe - short curved lines- circles- large shadows - long straight lines- Or at least something like - liquid - rocks - clouds - clothing

That'd be the sort of "promps" that could actually help you improve, although even that doesn't help you "ink" much as you'd first need to. unless you're already so good you can just ink without any pencilled guidelines at all to follow, you still need to draw something out

What you need are a bunch
of pre-penciled images to take your pen, brush, or crow quill to.

I personally haven't seen anything like that posted...and my newsfeeds are pretty filled with stuff related to inktober. SO...I got some here for you.

I picked out several Arsenic Lullaby illustrations of varying degrees of difficulty and each with different challenges. You got your long and short straight lines, long and short curved lines, organic stuff, inorganic stuff, fluids, Lines crowded together, lines all by their lonesome with nothing around to distract the eye from them...broken glass, wood, clothing, snow, liquids...a little bit of everything.

HI RESOLUTION PRINTABLE FILES OF EACH OF THESE ARE AVAILABLE HERE http://www.arseniclullabies.com/ink.html You can print them out on whatever paper you like and practice some inking! it's going to look a lot like this page, but you'll see the images are larger and have clickable links under them

Generally the job of the professional inker it not to wildly change the image by adding his/her own style. The inks should more or less look like the style they were drawn in. HOWEVER...since this is a learning exercise...sharpen your skills however you like. Try to ink the pencils dead on, or use different techniques to make the image in your own style, or someone else's style or whatever.

Except for the first two images that I did in my first year, I did every line here, free hand, with a brush.
You don't have to do it that way...and I really don't even recommend that ( there are a lot of lines here that it would have been smarter to use a pen and straight edge...but I'm stubborn, and also to lazy to go get a straight edge once I'm inking)

I have an inking video up on youtube VIDEO HERE

it is about using a brush. There a a few short videos of me actually inking HERE https://www.bitchute.com/channel/arsenic_lullaby/ . I may put up another instructional video this week.

My official instagram page is HERE https://www.instagram.com/arsenic_lullaby_official/

If you wanna send what you did our way or need a tip on something you're stuck on...
douglaspasz---a-- arseniclullaby.com

stay tuned...more images next week!

Later.

my own website with more of my work is here

https://www.arseniclullabies.com