It Finally Happened.

Hello! I've got grim news today: after sixteen years of valiant service, my drawing tablet finally gave up the ghost. I'd been preparing for this moment for a few years now so it hasn't really come as a surprise, but it does mean I'm on sort of a forced vacation from my work until my new tablet arrives. It's in the mail now, on its way from sunny California to my New England doorstep, so I should be back up and running Tuesday evening, barring any unforeseen calamities. The tablet held on until all my tasks were finished: it lasted one month and one day past when we shipped Kitsune Tails, it lasted through the weekend after the last Dead Winter page got posted and it held on until I got my Titan Garden art batches wrapped up. It left no work unfinished, and so it quietly stopped working. Thank you for your service, Gen 1 Wacom Cintiq 21UX. You can rest now.

o7

I, on the other hand, have not yet earned my rest. In lieu of the comic page I had hoped to put together for today, I decided that not having a tablet didn't mean I could just stop drawing all week, so what I did instead was I brought out my sketchbook and started doing some pen and ink illustrations instead. Having forced downtime is a good opportunity for me to work on my fundamentals, to shore up some weak areas of mine and "prove" to myself I can still make nice things without a digital undo or erase feature. For today's update I'll collect those illustrations here and do a little background writeup on what I was trying to work on with them- I posted these on Bluesky but they're what I drew so it's what I have to share. I figure some embellishments beyond the drawings as-posted would be appropriate for a Patreon post. So anyways, here's what I got:

I'd decided from the outset that I would expand on some Titan Garden characters for these illustrations, since I've drawn almost eighteen years of Dead Winter stuff, people might like to see the other thing I work on instead.  For my first illustration I drew Haley Redraven in the cockpit of the Ghost Crab, a single-seat test ship used to prove the effectiveness of salvaged starship parts to prospective buyers. I have two brush-tip pens and a green colored pencil I bought for my trip to Combo Breaker to draw on the train with, so as a test process to get better or more accurate ink drawings I've been blocking in shapes and subjects with the green pencil, going over the lines with the thicker of the two brush pens and then doing small details with the thinner pen. For an isometric shot of a starship pilot's seat I elected to reserve black fill-in shapes for depth and modeling, using it in places like the foot well or the rear panel- I can sometimes use black for coloring, to define something as being a different color than something else, but here I wanted to keep it simple, so I just used it to help define shapes and space. I think this one came out pretty okay, although I wish I could have put more doodads on the console, like a cupholder or a little figurine on the top of the dashboard. On my digital tablet that'd be easy to add retroactively, but inks are permanent, so I have to just live with what I committed to.

 Here is Puke Commander and Min-Jeong hanging out in the A-District eating hamburgers while they walk. These two are some of my favorite designs I put together for Titan Garden so I wanted to get a shot of them together, and figured my analog pen vacation was as good a time as any. For this illustration I used my inks as more of a shadow to render the figures themselves rather than use it to define the depth of space around them- you can see this under Puke Commander's chin and around his bicep, or in the shadow cast by Min-Jeong's hair over her eyes. I think for this piece I found myself struggling a little bit to draw accurate shapes with my green colored pencil, the pigment is really soft and it doesn't hold a sharp point very well, so my lines tend to be a bit imprecise. I sharpen pencils with a razorblade rather than a twisty sharpener since that can expose more of the pigment and let me whittle a steeper point, but even that only helped so much.

I tried to fix it a bit in inks but there's some areas, like Min-Jeong's leg, I wish I could just digital erase and try again. I also realized when I'm getting to the edge of my paper I'm angling my pen more, which is giving me thicker lines than I wanted (see: the trash can on the lower left). I made note of that and adjusted my pen grip accordingly.

 Here's Bryce Timberwolf enjoying a drink at the bar in some port town tavern somewhere. I have this fear when I'm working with ink, where I'll start using black to shade something, and then I'll have to use more of it to balance out the shading, and then I'll have to use more of it, and before I know it I've used too much black ink and I wish I had my old linework back. Here I wanted to render Bryce's hair tones with hashing, but I had to stop myself before I got too wild with it. There's a Europan EVO suit on the left, I put a couple hash marks in to imply a kind of shiny metallic surface and left it at that, but I hadn't quite mastered the edge-of-the-paper tech yet. I had thrown a couple lines into the crook of Bryce's elbow there, implying some wrinkle on the coat, but I wasn't looking at a reference so I thought, maybe a little more black will do it, and I had to stop myself quickly before I slid off into oblivion. This is also a big reason I wanted to imply the background as much as possible. If I did one table of silhouettes, then I'd need another, and then another row behind them, and then I gotta render the window, and then the upper corner of the ceiling and it all just spirals. I threw a silhouette against the window shape and put some kind of ventilation geometry up there and let it ride. This piece was about pushing the inks more, but it was also a practice in restraint.

 Bell Redraven singing at karaoke night. This one ended up being a pretty good example of what I meant by pushing the inks too far. I'd started out using a bit of hashmarks on the front of Bell's face, but then I felt like I needed to render the side, and then the tail separating it from his coat. And I had cast shadow under his arms and then that ended up becoming "all the coat down there is black. I scratched some floor shadows in to put him on the ground and now I'm in the black ink zone. I also swear that I can draw an isometric rectangle, but drawing the karaoke word prompter at the top of the page ended up getting a little sloppy somehow; that amp in the back also isn't quite up to my standards. I suspect that my using the big pen for my inks and then the smaller pen for finer details wasn't working to my advantage, so I decided on the next one I'd switch it around and try it a different way, and hopefully I can get my inks looking cleaner.

 Anibelle and June, the funny space pirates. With this piece I tried to incorporate a lot of what I learned from the previous pieces: I felt like my inks were getting cramped so I drew a larger portrait rather than a small full-body, I committed to balancing out my shapes with my green pencil enough that I can put better inks overtop, I wanted to limit my hashing and keep my hash strokes in a mostly uniform direction and I decided I'd do the whole thing with the thin-line pen first and use the thicker pen to black out key shapes. I think this one came out a lot better, the subjects are larger and the lines are finer, I'm not trying to render 3D shading with my pens but I'm also adding a bit of contrast to my key shapes. I demonstrated remarkable pen control in drawing June at the edge of the page and I think she came out really nice. This one's definitely a culmination of trial, error, introspection and adjustment on my traditional media process. It's my favorite one of the batch so far.

I've got a few days before my tablet gets here so I'll be doing a bit more pen-and-inkwork before I can get back to business as usual. Thanks for checking in! Ain't nothing I can do about the tablet situation but wait, so I'm gonna keep working on my fundamentals in the meantime. Until next time, have a nice week!