Dark Waters -Inktober

My 12th drawing for Inktober

For my twelfth drawing I went with the Inktober prompt suggestion of Whale. In this piece a whale is swimming through a dark sea. A couple of months ago I visited the Museum of Zoology in Cambridge and saw the 21 metre long skeleton of a Fin Whale.

The museum has owned the whale since 1866, the year after it was washed up dead in Pevensey Bay in Sussex. The Fin Whale is the second largest species of whale, after the Blue Whale. When alive it is thought it would have weighed about 80 tonnes, the equivalent of eight double decker buses.
https://www.museum.zoo.cam.ac.uk/highlights/items/fin-whale

I have decided to get out my ink pens and join in with Inktober, you can find more details about Inktober on the website: https://inktober.com/.

Source: https://inktober.com/rules/

Creating my drawing

I haven't drawn a 70ft whale in the drawing I created today, but the head of a whale swimming into view through the dark waters. After putting down some initial lines with my dip pen and drawing ink I applied wax to areas of the whales body, before giving it a wash of ink.

Our seas are filled with plastic, a disaster for wildlife and mankind. To represent the floating plastics I used crumpled cling film over the wet ink to create a series of marks.

'Dark Waters'

Ink on paper


If you want to see some of my previous ink illustrations check out DWELLING, an illustrated crime novel collaboration between myself and fellow Steemian @dougkarr, set in New York’s Lower East Side. Dwelling is now available in print and ePub.
Dwelling available on Amazon

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