Inktober 52 - 2021 34

Doorways hold such a fun place in popular culture. They're universally understood to be important, but rarely explicitly visible, which makes me always think of architecture, which usually fulfills a similar role in public spaces. Maybe that's why I first thought of Anor Londo when the prompt came up. I'm unfortunately not as talented as the visual designers of Dark Souls, and not architecturally savvy enough, to reconstruct the style, so I'll have to scale things down a little and maybe add a friend or something.

This unusually blue picture is the initial concept of the piece. I was thinking about putting a small human in the foreground, to invoke a slight Bloodborne-inspired atmosphere. There is something peculiar about the shifty-eyed octopus in general, I think. Cartoon octopuses are entirely my jam anyway, so I'm not surprised they've found their way into this piece either.

The initial sketch features me struggling with fitting all the octopus-limbs into the frame, and also struggling with constructing the walls adjacent to the doorway. From the left side of the doorway it's somewhat apparent that I don't have an intuitive understanding of how these are usually constructed.

I added some detail and a smidgeon of my thumb. I came out pretty sure that the walls on the right are too low, so I had to make the architecture just a little bit deteriorated. That's fine though, it's not anything I was against from the outset.

I ended up looking up references for Anor Londo after all, just to find out the usual structure of these doorways. I also needed something to fill out the background to give the image a little depth.

Inking went like it does usually. Where it really shines, I think is the octopus-friend's eye. I've seen Junji Itoh and similar horror-artists draw eyes like that and for creature designs I think it's quite striking.

Again, I felt like there needed to be some middle-ground shading. It's really quite convenient to have around, and allows the rest to pop a little more. I thought about ink-shading the octopus black, but it doesn't really work in this position, I think.