Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

    Once in a while I like to humble myself by working in a traditional medium.  I love ink, brushes, and quills but rarely work in it these days.  I was never anything more than an amateur, but still love to mess around with it once in a while.  Unfortunately, over the last 15 years of working in the animation industry, my skills haven't been kept as sharp as I'd hope.  It's compounded with a bad habit I've developed over years and years of gesture drawing.  Doing a quick sketch in ink? No problem.  Doing a long sustained illustration? Problem.  My impatience starts building on any drawing that takes me longer than a few hours.   Even as I hit the ripe old age of 40, I still struggle to slow down and focus.   Probably a mental disorder in there somewhere.

    Case in point, Mr. Karate man shown here, pencils, worked well enough but were still fairly loose. No problem, I know what I'm doing, I'll solve it in the inking stage I said.   It had some lovely kinetic energy so I was excited to get on with it.  Unfortunately, it went south pretty quick.  The initial inking pass I did worked well enough, but lacked a clear plan.  Near the finish line, I start inking faster and looser.  The result left a lot to be desired, as I was unhappy with the line quality and any rendering done was inconsistent. 

    Not to be discouraged (yet), I did a pass on it digitally to figure out what I thought wasn't working and that brought back a lot of that initial excitement.   Thinking that now I had a plan, it'd be a cinch to jump in and bring it to this final stage back in the real world, I grabbed my pens and brushes and dove in with the precision of a wet noodle. 

It wasn't a cinch. 

    Refining a lot of the lines was a good idea, and the shapes were reading much better, but the hatching was even sloppier.   I was using a nice brush but rushed through each stroke, not taking enough care and consideration to make sure each line had the proper length and spacing.  I tried cleaning it up with some tech pens, which seemed to help.  Then came the ink wash.  POW, right on the jaw.  Now, this is a hard lesson that I never seem to learn, but it NEVER works out whenever I water the ink down to get a nice grey mid tone into the piece.  The initial placement of tone immediately looked bad, and of course I doubled down to make it worse.  I finished executing my plan with utter disappointment.  I walked away discouraged but determined to try again at a later time. 

  Making art is a battle of the mind, and my opponent is always getting tougher.