Inktober 52 - 2021, 17
I had a little trouble deciding what to do with that one. The prompt "wave" doesn't conjure a lot of things I'm able to render as of yet. For context: I'm a physicist above anything else, even if it doesn't seem that way from the things I write about. While that means I get to think about math and invisible things most days, it also means that the word "wave" conjures images of sine wave and Schroedinger equations. I can probably free-hand wave functions, but that doesn't help me for this kind of thing - not if I'm not doing anything with it otherwise. All that considered, I decided to stick with the other kind of wave. That introduces a different kind of problem.
I can't remember the last time I put any attention to water and the visual texture I'm familiar with, I'm very sure I can't render. When it comes to the visual arts, the one rendering of waves I can immediately remember is Hokusai Katsushika's Wave off Kanagawa. It's an absolutely beautiful way of painting water, especially the white foam of the wave. Normally, white isn't really the colour I associate with water, but the lines in Hokusai's Wave are really clean and the white foam gives it this incredibly feeling of motion. So even while I'm sure I'm not going to be able to approximate the piece in any way, I'm allowing myself to copy the foam. So after several attempts, this is the pencil sketch I came up with.
The foam here follows the wake of the surfboard, and I wanted it to head down into a sort of water-hole, I guess? It's not meant to be anything specific, I just thought it'd justify the person I drew being this small in the frame.
Okay, so I forgot to take a picture of the finished pencil sketch. I played around with pencil shading and stuff, but I think, this picture is simple enough for me to maybe mess around with inks a bit. In all honesty, I would've left it, but the pencil sketch alone seems a little flat and because of the graphite smudging, the stark contrast of the foam gets lost a little. If I trace the lines with ink, I can make a few passes with an eraser. That will hopefully help upping the contrast. Also yes, I didn't check whether the picture was blurry or not, which was a mistake I hope won't happen too often. All in all, I turn out to be surprisingly bad at documenting my progress on each picture.
About 90 Minutes and one fineliner later. I almost wish I had some colours because this turned out much cooler than I thought it would when I had the sketch. So I clearly added some more stuff to the water. Once I had inked the lines I had in the pencil sketch, it looked a little empty, so the contrast of the foam didn't really register all too well. The upside with the ink is of course that the contrast is more extreme, but I haven't been able to find a good way of finding a middle-ground for the clothing. I played a little with inking shadows as well, and I'm actually kinda happy with how it looks. Maybe I'll make this part of my regular process and skip over the pencil shading, although that does mean I'll have to pay even more attention to avoid tangents. in my line-art. I especially like the space where the surfboard jots out of the water, where the black lines of the water and the shadows of the board frame the outline of the foam. That's more or less the effect I was going for.