“Ripped Water” 11×17 inch ink drawing.
I’ve been a bit of a maniac about drawing this week. More so than I’ve been in a while. It has to do with figuring out my next painting of the summer. I’ve finished two paintings so far and want to get a third one going. But I gave myself a little time to figure out what I want that third one to be. I’ve spent that time drawing.
From June 27 to July 1 (2025) I made ten 9×12 inch drawings. I dug through scans of a lot of unfinished drawings and came up with twelve drawings to work on. They were either 6×9 inch pencil drawings or 6×9 inch ink drawings. I blew them up to 9×12 inches and printed them out in blue line a Bristol board.
I actually printed out the twelve drawings in two batches over a couple of days. I drew the first few of them and then decided that I wanted even more choices and printed out the second half of them.
Before printing out all of these drawings I was a bit aimless for a couple of days. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to paint and was getting nowhere. That’s when I decided to “Flood the zone.” I decided to spend my time making a lot of drawings. That way I would have a lot of choices of finished drawings to choose from. I wouldn’t have to imagine what a finished drawing would look like and make a choice from that imagining.
“Flip Through” 11×17 inch ink drawing.
One, two, four, two, two. Those are the amount of drawings I got done each day. That middle day was a Sunday and I just kept drawing all day. It turned out that only ten of the twelve drawings that I printed out are in the running to be a painting. The eleventh one I’m going to make into a “Dreams of Things” cover and the twelfth one I decided against drawing. I thought it was a little too mechanical and might make a better digital drawing.
That is a lot of drawing over five days. A couple of the days I got other things done too but it still felt like I was moving fast and getting things done. It was a good felling.
With ten finished 9×12 inch drawings in hand I scanned them all in. After making the scans I set them all up to be printed out in blue line on an 11×17 inch piece of Bristol board. I would ink them at that size and make finished ink drawings out of them.
Two, four, two. Those are the amount of drawings that I’ve inked over the last three days. I’ve got eight out of the ten finished. I’ve been inking them with a brush (dipped in ink of course) and a bunch of different size black markers. I use the markers with a straight edge to make straight lines and a French curve to make curved lines. If I want to lines to look natural I use the brush and if I want then to look mechanical I use the markers.
“Big Blast” 11×17 inch ink drawing.
I’ve kind of surprised myself on how well I’ve been able to get these drawings pencilled and inked. I have only one more day of work to go and I’ve been happy with them. I wasn’t sure that I had it in me to get so many of them done in such a short period of time but it’s all worked out well so far.
I think one of the reasons it’s worked out well is because I decided early on to use a lot of these drawings for other things. I’m only trying to figure out what to do next with one painting but if I do all this work now I can use the other drawings for other things.
I haven’t made any Big Ink drawings in quite a while and there are two of these drawings that are more suited for those than for a painting. I might pull those two out when I decide to do a Big Ink drawing again.
A couple of them might make nice prints too. Once I scan all the finished ink drawing in I’ll set them up so that I can color them in Adobe Illustrator. I’ve been doing my color sketches for my paintings that way but it’s also how I color my digital prints. Of course the digital prints take a lot more time to finish than a color sketch but someday I’ll want to make some and these ones will be ready to go.
The one I mentioned above that’s going to be a “Dreams of Things” cover is because it already is a DOT cover. In looking through my old scanned in drawings I picked one that I made into a cover about ten years ago. It looked familiar to me so I dug through the covers to discover that I made it into “Dreams of Things” number nine. This gave me an idea.
I recently finished inking “Dreams of Things” number 298 which means I’m two covers from issue 300. I’ve been trying to think of what to do for that big number. I knew I wanted to make multiple covers for issue 300 but I didn’t know what of. This helped me decide.
I’m going to revisit some of my earliest DOT covers and redraw them. My original concept for these covers was to make a simple graphic design-ish drawing for each cover. The whole idea was to work out images that wouldn’t take me a lot of time to finish. They started out that way but as time went by they got more and more complicated. The early ones look nothing like the later ones.
So I took this drawing from issue nine and redrew it like I’d draw it today. It’s the same basic drawing but it got a lot more complicated. More bells and whistles. I like the old one but I’m going to try and make the new one better. I think I want to take four to six old ones and redo them. That’ll be a lot of alternate covers for issue 300. I’m also going to have to come up with an image for the main cover. I haven’t figured that one out yet.
All in all it’s been a good week and a half of drawing. All my weeks aren’t like that so I’ll take it.