Flashback Friday: Pen & Ink

I started drawing with pen and ink, using a dip pen (usually a little Hunt 102, which is still my favourite) and india ink, sometime in junior high school (that would have been about 1985-1988--yes, I am old). My art teacher at the time thought I had a lot of good energy in my line work, and that was all the encouragement I needed to make pen and ink one of my main media for drawing for years afterward (which just shows the effect a teacher can have).

Obviously I wasn't especially good at it right away, but I liked the results enough to keep going. And while I was still drawing fantasy (a habit I have never broken and don't really care to), I was also starting to do fewer obviously Elfquest-inspired characters, and more things out of my own imagination.

Also of note, it was around this time I started trying to develop a little wordmark or monogram to use as a signature. I later abandoned "Nik" in favour of "Niko," but I've since come back to it (partly because, as indicated by the title of this blog, it's an anagram of "ink").

Flashback Friday: Watercolour

Yes, sorry, it's another elf, and this time I pretty much re-drew it directly from a page of ElfQuest (I didn't trace, it though, but re-drew it freehand). What's significant about this picture, though (at least for me, is that it's one of the earliest examples I have of the pen & ink with watercolour combination I still use.

I obviously hadn't really got the hang of shading yet, except in a tentative way with the linework, but I can see the beginnings of more developed work than I had been doing. This is also the first piece of mine that my junior high art teacher thought was good enough to put in the display case outside the school office.

Flashback Friday: And Again...

Yes, another elf. By the time I drew this one, I was starting to do less copying and more trying to draw based on how I remembered faces/bodies/things fitting together. And I was getting a bit better at using colour. This is probably still junior-high era work. For some reason I seem to have more of that to hand than of high school or early university stuff.

There is still a lot of ElfQuest influence--as there probably will be for the rest of my life. Which reminds me, I think it's time I re-read the whole series and got caught up on the new books...

Flashback Friday: You Guessed It

Um, yes, it's another elf. Also very Elfquest-influenced, right down to the character's name. I'm not sure why I thought a lavender leather bikini would be good forest wear, though.

Pencil and pencil crayon, probably from sometime in the ... mid to late 80s, maybe.

Flashback Friday: Sorry, More Elves

Yes, more elves. I drew a lot of them. I cannot understate the influence ElfQuest had on me. This time, two of my characters have some... er... private time in the forest.

I don't know what possessed me to draw on lined paper. I was probably doodling in a school notebook and decided to make a finished drawing without transferring the sketch to better paper (I probably didn't really know how).

My backgrounds were always pretty sketchy, but it looks like I was attempting something like atmospheric perspective here, with the background fading out while the foreground is more detailed. Or maybe I was just lazy.

Flashback Friday: Another Elf

There are going to be a lot of elves in these Flashback Friday posts. And also a lot of dragons. It's pretty much all I drew for years.

In this one, I was obviously still figuring out the inking thing, and ended up obscuring a lot of pencil detail with big, thick awkward outlines. Ah well...

This is about the same vintage as the last one, around age 14 or 15.

Satyrday

Because I haven't posted anything in a while, here are some satyrs.

Prints are available on my deviantArt site, and will soon (probably) be up on Redbubble and Society6 too.

Also, I will be starting up Stamp Saturday again soon. I'm very excited to finally have time to play with all those materials I bought.

Flashback Friday: Elves

I always loved to draw, and pretty much started drawing (and writing stories) the moment I figured out how to make marks on paper. But in junior high I encountered the wonderful indie comic Elfquest and really started drawing all the time and trying to make my own comics (though many of my earliest drawings were accompanied by words in the form of illustrated stories).

The influence of Elfquest on my drawing style was huge, and still quite visible in my work today. 

This pencil crayon piece was one of my earliest attempts to create my own characters in in the Elfquest world. (Warning: there will be a lot of elves in upcoming Flashback Friday posts. They were my favourite thing to draw for many years, and if you know my work, you know I haven't outgrown them yet.) Oh, and the guy on the left isn't aiming at the girl on the right; they're meant to be two separate character studies.

I think I was around 14 or 15 when I drew this.

Flashback Friday: Bird Wizard

Here's another cringe-worthy old drawing for your enjoyment. I was still rather awful at adding colour to pencil drawings. Right after I drew this (but before adding colour), one of my younger cousins was so impressed he wanted to draw one himself, so he copied off my drawing. I think I used to have his version, too, but it seems to have been lost in the mists of time. Or something.

I can't remember how old I was when I made this, but I'm pretty sure I was in junior high, so I must have been between thirteen and sixteen. I had probably just re-read The Lord of the Rings. Again. (I still do that from time to time, though I haven't drawn any wizards in ages.)

Flashback Friday: Rainbows and Unicorns

I was going to try to start doing occasional Throwback Thursday posts, but yesterday I got called in to work early and didn't get time. So instead, here's Flashback Friday, in which I will post old drawings of mine.

Some of these, like this week's, are really going to make me cringe. But I think it's useful to look back at old work, especially for me, because I have a tendency to not see the progress I'm making the more I practice. Looking at these really old pieces makes that progress obvious.

I don't now how old this particular piece is, but if I had to guess I'd say I was maybe twelve or thirteen when I drew it. I'll dig out the original later and see if I might have dated it somewhere (I made a book of old drawings for a second year creative writing class about a million years ago -- aka the early 90s -- then photographed that book maybe seven or eight years ago, so I have quite a few terrible old drawings around).

Anyway, here's a lovely crayon image of a unicorn, a pegasus, and a rainbow. Because I was a tween girl once, and even if I was a tomboy I also liked unicorns and rainbows and sometimes even sparkly things.