Inktober 52 - 2021 28

If I were more into YouTube mystery culture, I would've made fan-art, but I'm not, and I didn't. I don't really have any associations with poppy flowers, aside from the Wizard of Oz and I'm not going to draw a scene. Instead I tried finding a way to frame a poppy flower in a way that seemed interesting to me. At the same time that thing I said last week starts getting difficult. While I'm not in the habit of drawing poppies, my tendency to default to planty things when I'm not sure what to fill the frame with might hint at certain affinities I've had with my sketches. So two things I've noted over the last few weeks of experimenting with art.

1. I don't know how to add irises and pupils in ink sketches

2. I don't know how to convey fabric interacting with matter

So I'm going to frame the poppy, and add a person, so I can practice both of these things.

No references this week. I'm hoping what I drew is a poppy, if it's not I wouldn't be too surprised. I surprised myself by doing another thing I'm not great at, namely human head profiles. Originally I thought it'd be a good way to get an eye and fabric in frame while still keeping the focus on the poppy, but looking at the result, that's going to take some practice. Now, the fabric-human interaction and the eye will start getting relevant when I take to the fine-liner. Pencil-shading would normally take care of those problems for me, because the shading is so soft that I can hide detail in it. I want to keep this to fine-liner though, so that's not an option for this.

I've seen this way of drawing irises before and I thought that might be the way to go here. It's not great yet, because the pupil is really only hinted at here, and I'm not sure how to change that without drawing too much attention to it. Maybe in the next few iterations, or maybe I'll learn to like this look. The fabric over the arm is working mostly for me. Now, I'm not sure whether it'll keep working if I zoomed out. At the same time, I did this very intuitively, which kinda wasn't the point of the exercise. I'll try giving this a little more space next time around, so I can figure out a method.

It speaks with passion and thinks of night

it greets the day with flames on sight.

When wind shakes its petals and spins their heap

It deeply exhales and speaks of sleep