Orruh

[pasithea]

Orruh by ~dv-girl on deviantART

While I've been sick, I've watched the Dark Crystal like 10 times.

Also tried switching to a harder pen for a while to do drawings with a little more detail. I've been working with really soft pencils for some time now because I like the feel of them and how they move when I work. Since my drawings had been way too stiff, this was also good for getting me to loosen up and make things with bigger arcs. But now that I feel like I've got a decent handle on motion, I feel like I should start giving more attention to anatomy and detail.

I doubt I'll be completely switching away from soft pencils any time soon but I may try to use them more often for 'finished' works like this one.


The drawing itself is on 15x20 watercolor paper. At Christmas, I had a friend over and he wanted to study doing gradient washes in watercolor and burned through a few pages of my biggest watercolor paper. I couldn't bring myself to just throw out the paper so I decided to try creating stuff over the washes he'd done.

Annoyingly, my fountain pen, it turns out, uses a very water soluble ink, so after I did all the line work I was somewhat annoyed and dismayed to find that I wasn't going to be able to do color over it.

Curiously however, the ink is not soluable in xylene (which is a non-polar solvent as opposed to water which is a polar solvent) so I did work with watercolor pencil and a brush dipped in xylene. Stinky but effective.

All in all, I think I'm mostly happy with the result. Especially given it was material that would otherwise have just gotten pitched.

It is, of course, nowhere near as lavish as Froud's work and I'm not entirely thrilled with the composition but it's also not the worst thing I've ever made. :)