New drawing

I never seem to devote much time to drawing these days. If I look back to the 1980s and 1990s I was drawing all the time. I suspect that part of that was because I wasn't writing so much - I had young kids and was working a 40 hour week and it's easier to sit with a sketchpad in front of the telly than it is to find time to thump out a new book chapter. 

Here are some examples of what I was churning out back then. Hard to believe that I drew the first picture nearly 40 years ago ...

As the millennium approached I started teaching myself to paint in acrylics so, again, that took up all my spare time, along with a resurgence in my writing. I also learned to create digital art so I was doing these sorts of things:

And then I developed a passion for assemblage - making sculptures from recycled materials: 

But, just recently, I was looking through old sketchpads and I had the sudden urge to pick up pen and pencil once again. So I doodled a goblin. Then I grabbed a pen and started inking it and the results were terrible! I'm so out of practice!

It was completely overworked and, in rushing it, the character's anatomy felt all wrong. 

So I slowed down, got the pencils out again and doodled. Eventually I came up with a figure I liked. So I drew in the basic outlines in biro and then traced it (using my lightbox) onto an A3 sheet of decent cartridge paper.

Then I worked out the shading with the light source coming from the goblin's right (my left).

Some last minute tweaks and then I began to add the inks using Rotring Tikky Graphic art pens in two thicknesses - 0.8 and 0.3.

And here's the finished result. 

There are SO many things wrong with it ... the hands are awful, as are the feet. The horns and the boots don't match and ...

Yes, of course I'm being hyper-critical but spotting what's wrong will hopefully mean that the next drawing will be better. We learn from experience.

I'm pretty sure that some of my influences shine through here - comic artists like Gil Kane, Mick McMahon, Brian Bolland, Simon Bisley, Cam Kennedy, Dave Gibbons, Kev O'Neill, Alfredo Alcala, Alex Nino, Vin Deighan ... they're all in there somewhere along with a smattering of Ronald Searle, W Heath Robinson, Willy Rushton, Rowland Emett and Quentin Blake too. 

I'm quite pleased with it ... despite seeing everything that's wrong with it!

But it has inspired me to do some more.

So watch this space.