Ink lines and the elephant in the children’s book.

We took a quick trip out of town for Easter/Spring Break/ Passover/Fertility festivals or whatever one celebrates at this time of the year. Although I did relax, I spent most of the time thinking about what kind of ink line I wanted to use on the children’s book I’m working on. Unfortunately, these are the kinds of demons that haunt my days off. It’s always in the back of my mind. I look at the last book I did and wonder how I drew such boring lines. Will the publisher notice and pulp them all? Lately I’m testing out ink brushes using a Cintiq, which is always a battle against the perfect. In my experience, I can tell you that the best line I ever created was by breaking a chop stick in half and inking with that splintered piece of imperfect wood. In the process you inevitably stab yourself and inflict inky splinters. This small amount of pain and suffering is what I think actually convinces me that the drawing is perfect and worthy of not going into the trashcan. The positive effects of self-inflicted pain could, and have, made up entire blog posts (and books, and movies, and songs) so I won’t go into that here in my brief paragraph. Rather, I’ve posted a sketch here from my next book. After drawing the book three times or so, I finally like the line work I did on this elephant. And I didn’t even hurt myself. elephant 1

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