Inktober 52 - 2021 21

Oh boy, am I excited about this one. Octopuses and things themed after them have always been very appealing to me, and for once that's not entirely dependent on my love of sea-food. Octopuses are just really fun creatures, all tentacles and balloony heads. However, I drew an underwater scene last week, so I'd rather not do another one this week. I've been defaulting to watery settings, whenever I have trouble coming up with a concept. For people who don't want to draw an octopus in water, there's a bunch of fun octopus creatures, so there's where I went

There he is! This is my first genuine attempt at a Cthulhu, and most of it is contingent on me rarely picturing that particular creature from the waist down. Cthulhu with legs just seems weird to me, but he can't just stop at the hips. Either way, all in all, I'm pretty proud of the hand and head-shape. Not only that, but this sketch was also done entirely without reference. That's probably obvious from the weird candy-cane lighthouse in the left, but I'm not turning around to change that now. It's really small anyways, so maybe if I don't point it out, nobody will notice. I mainly included it, because I wanted a secondary light-source next to the moon.

I was trying to give the impression of different intensities of shadows with the tighter, of less tightly grouped areas of parallel lines. I fell back on the trick I used on the Cat prompt, when I outlined neighboring black areas. I'm seeing myself applying it a few times here, mainly because I definitely want the water to be black as well, and the courted off area on the left is supposed to be the other wing, but since that's entirely not illuminated that'll be entirely in shadow. It'll frame the head nicely - mainly because there's no way I can shade that at this point. It'll dissolve the form, and I'm not sure I want to do that here.

The sky also ended up black, surprise. It does make the head pull focus though, which is ultimately what I was going for. I'm also really pleased by how well the hand reads. I didn't need a lot of pass-overs in the sketch to get the proportions right. The decision to ink the sky was entirely dependent on how the clouds would behave, and they did so pretty well, I think. They still clearly read as clouds, and it helps that the shading makes them read as darker clouds. For those specifically, I can't see myself getting those free-hand though, since the method used to get their shapes are not really ink-friendly.