Thom Yorke

So, anyone who was following along with the 31 drawings I did for Inktober (which is an even more masochistic activity than drawing them in the first place) might have noticed that that I started playing with this smudgy inky style a bit. 

It's been creeping up for a little while now, a couple of smudges here and there in the sketchbook and one commissioned piece that fully embraced it. Having 31 drawings to experiment with I tried it out a few times during the month - some attempts were a bit off, but I like the way some of them turned out. I didn't know how they would look when I got the colour added on Photoshop but here's one above. It's Thom. Thom Yorke. Thom Yorke from Radiohead.

In many ways this is what I've been building up to all along, I'm a big fan of the contrast between tactile inky drawings and clean precise digital colouring, and I've got a big thing for drawing head and shoulders portraits of people I dig (if 250 odd weekly drawings haven't clued you into that yet). And I'm getting close to the apotheosis of what I can do with that. With these I've been smudging the drawing with my hands, colouring the tips of my fingers with ink and then applying it directly to the paper and leaving all my light switches dirty. It's a bunch of fun. 

And then I get to spend a few hours and a huge amount of Photoshop layers diligently applying gradients and variously opaque blocks of colour clicked out with the marquee tool.

I'm having the most fun I've ever had drawing head and shoulders portraits of people I dig. And now I think it's time I try something new.