Inkblots and Bexes

Bex || Toronto-based Illustrator || In love with fantasy, character design, and watercolours

[inkbybex]

☕ Do you do warmup sketches before drawing? (Bonus: do you have any to share?)

It depends! I want to get into a better habit of it in general, but honestly if I'm just painting or inking on any given day I'll usually skip straight into that.

I do like to loosen up a bit before sketchwork though! Most of my warm ups are covered in incomprehensible scrawl, but hey if it works 😂

[miss-mossball]

🌼Artist Ask meme!🌼

There’s probably a lotta these out there but I wanted to make one of my own! Hopefully these are fun<3 

Send an emoji for each question!

 🖍️ When did you start drawing? Do you remember?  

 ✏️ Do you prefer traditional art or digital to relax?   

📏 What’s your go-to canvas size?

☕ Do you do warmup sketches before drawing? (Bonus: do you have any to share?)

🙃 Which is easier: faces facing left, right, or front view?

📚 How many layers do you typically use?

🐻 Your go-to things to draw when you need comfort?

🎁 Do you prefer drawing fandom stuff or your own characters?

🌈 Do you use more warm or cold colors?

🎼 Your favorite music to draw to right now?

🙌 Draw a doodle with your non-dominant hand

📐 Whats your favorite kinds of lines to draw?

💐 Do your drawing suit your aesthetics?

🦋 Do your drawings resemble you?

✨ How often do you draw?

🌗 Is night or day better for drawing?

🍭 What’s your main art blog / what do you tag your art with?

🍀 You wish your art was more..(fill in the blank)

🌊 What’s the hardest thing for you to draw? 

🙊 Share your latest silly doodle with no context

[pencilcat]

30 Days of Art Improvement Challenge

Are you tired of feeling like your art just isn’t improving? Do you want to do a 30-day challenge that’s actually useful? Welcome to 30 Days of Improvement Hell. >:D

I made this because I’ve been feeling super ‘blah’ about my art these days, and I needed something to kick-start myself. Who wants to do this with me!? Start now or whenever you can (now you procrastinators!). Challenge yourself and have fun at the same time!

Tag your posts with #Improvement Hell so everyone can follow along and see each other’s awesome artwork. I may even create a blog and reblog them! :D

What are you waiting for? START!

Self-Portrait - Introduce yourself

Draw a figure using a reference - link to reference

Draw a figure that’s in action, using a reference - link to reference

Draw a part of the human anatomy you have trouble with. x20, with atleast 5 being skeletal/musculature studies.

Draw more figures. Quick gestures and silhouettes. x20, with atleast 10 different body shapes

Let’s have some fun. Design a character from either This or This character generator! Be creative and bring something to life!

Pick the weirdest object in your house/room. Draw it. Shadows and Highlights.

Find 2-3 objects, make a scene with them. Draw it. Bonus points for creativity. Double points for dramatic lighting.

Draw a landscape of a place you’ve never been or drawn.

Draw a BG with 1pt Perspective. Negative points if it’s a railroad or an empty street.

Draw a BG with 2pt Perspective.

Look out a window. Draw what you see. Bonus points for adding something interesting.

Draw an interior setting with the character you designed on Day #6 in it.

BG with either bird’s eye or worm’s eye view.

Halfway there! Draw three ‘action’ scenes with different compositions in each. Quick sketches are fine, just make them interesting and understandable! Bonus points if it’s the same scene, but different composition.

Draw a single page comic with 5-7 panels (the story begins and ends on one page). 

Draw an animal you’ve never drawn before. x10  Link references.

Draw a car. Negative points for whining. Hint: Use a perspective grid.

Think of the thing you hate drawing the most. Guess what? Draw it! Negative points for lying to yourself.

Pick an object in your house/room. Now design a character from it, using the shapes, forms, textures, purpose and colors as inspiration. Also link/post the object you used. Negative points for using a humanoid action figure.

Draw a character/object/scene, and shade them using ONLY solid blacks and whites. Bonus points for good use of lights/shadows

Draw a different object/scene/character. Shade using hatching, crosshatcing, and/or pointillism. Bonus points for lights/shadows and textures.

Colors! Pick a color palette, and paint a scene/character/object using only those colors (some blending allowed). Bonus points for good use of lights/shadows.

Draw and color a scene/object/character - no lines allowed! (aka - lineless art). Don’t forget light and shadows!

Draw a scene/character in a style you’ve never drawn before. If emulating an artist, credit+link. Bonus for color style.

Draw a character. Draw 10 emotions/expressions. Bonus points for 'uncommon’ emotions. (i.e. anxiety, guilt, despair, loneliness etc.)

Draw three random shapes using your opposite hand (or your foot). Now design characters from those shapes.

Turn on the tv (or load your illegally downloaded movies). Pick an actor and draw them.

Almost done! Let’s have some fun. Draw some fanart. Bonus points if it’s super obscure and unknown. Make people guess what it’s from.

Last day! Find a drawing you did within the last year. Now draw it again using what you’ve learned! Link it for comparison!

 Look at all that amazing improvement! Congrats!

[Update] There is now a sequel challenge, Draw All The Things!

[dailyfaust]

I’m going to be doing this and then the sequel ((mixed in with some other improvement practice)) over on @inkbybex I think!!!

[inkbybex]

Reminding myself for the new year 💪

[inkbybex]

Long time no post! Here's my only currently scanned piece from Inktober, I'm planning on colourizing it sometime down the line (and maybe selling prints?)

[inkbybex]

Warm-up sketch of a cute, soft Growlithe! I can’t remember the last time I drew a Pokemon, they were like 90% of my drawings when I first got into the crayons as a kid but I guess I fell off that wagon. I might do some more Pokemon pics for prints once I’m through with my current queue though!

[inkbybex]

Long time no post, sorry all! Was working on some projects behind the scenes, getting sick constantly, and travelling to Spain (and then getting sick upon getting back, I might be bad at this “Immune System” thing) But let’s cut to what you’re all here for! The art! A rare dive into logo design for me, this one is for a Coffee Subscription club with a Masonic flair. Getting a chance to flex my linework muscles and try out a new-ish style is always a blast, I really loved working on this one!

[inkbybex]

Just coming off being sick for like a week! Sorry for the scant posting! This final Thesis piece covers the belief that Digestion was the process of cooking things in your stomach using the heat from your liver. I mean cooking food breaks it down, your stomach also breaks things down, checkmate! These little goblins were all really fun to paint, it’s hard not to smile when you’re painting a little green dude cooking stew in a stomach.

[inkbybex]

Another super textured paper, this time with added metallic paint bonus! "Medical Astrology" was the belief that your star sign and the heavenly bodies governing it affected your health. For example, Taurus peeps were supposed to be more prone to maladies of the throat. For this one I wanted something simple and iconic, kind of in line with old medieval zodiac paintings. I totally messed up half of the frame though, woops!

[inkbybex]

Here we go! I still think it’s funny that THIS is the piece my tablet decided to overheat while working on. This picture covers the belief that the heart worked kind of like a furnace and that it was cooled by cold air flowing through the arteries... from the brain. Not quite right on that one. For a more contemporary take on heart issues, food was included as clogging up the furnace and causing our poor, sad robodude to overheat.  This was one of the pieces I had the most fun working on! It was a lot more whimsical and a few steps removed from the actual functions being communicated, which gave me a lot more design room to play around in! I’m also a total sucker for taking elements from within a piece and using them to form a frame for the rest of the image.

[inkbybex]

It's too hot for my computer to handle edits today, unfortunately, so the post that was supposed to go up tonight will be up tomorrow instead. Here's some photos for a sneak peek of what you'll be in for! This little robot was one of my favourites to work on, so much fun!

[inkbybex]

Slightly different post style this time, sorry guys! The texture of this paper makes getting a clean scan very difficult, so today you’re getting something more like what you’d see on my Instagram.

“Miasma Theory” was the belief that illness was caused by bad smells and that in order to avoid getting sick you’d just need to smell nice things instead!

The wood and mushroom detailing on this was an absolute joy to work on, I love painting more natural things like this!

[inkbybex]

The “Doctrine of Signatures” was the belief that plants that looked like human body parts (and sometimes it was a pretty big stretch) would help heal those body parts. In this picture we have celery healing bone and a flower called “Eyebright” which helped with… well you can probably guess. This one was tricky because of the angle, making sure two disparate surgeries read clearly was a compositional challenge, but the actual concept didn’t read very well with just one figure being operated on. I think the idea behind it and the imagery is pretty fun though and the most obviously “medical” of all of these illustrations. There’s a lot of neat inspiration that can be drawn from the ways we’ve linked plants and human bits and it might be a concept I revisit more vaguely and conceptually in some future fantasy pieces!

[inkbybex]

"Phrenology" is the belief that someone's nature is determined by the shape of their brain and thus that you can judge someone's character based on the bumps of their skull. This is one of the more modern beliefs in the set! It's a doozy, and you still get small pockets of people believing in it! This is another case where the composition turned out well (if you look from a distance, there's some subtle skull-shape going on with the background elements!), but the actual rendering is affected by being one of my earlier works. I'm definitely less confident in this piece than in others within the thesis, but what can you do!

[inkbybex]

“Hysteria” is the belief that the womb traveled through the body, causing madness as it pressed up against other organs and disrupted the way the body worked. Some people believed that demons carried the uterus around, just to cause trouble I suppose. This was the first piece I completed for my Illustration thesis, way back in October! I still really enjoy the composition and flow of the piece, and the ideation process was really fun (give me a shout if you want me to toss my process work up on here! There’s lots of it!), but I feel like my technical abilities have gotten a lot better since I started on this whole shindig.  It’s probably my number one candidate for re-doing, so look forward to that inevitability sometime down the line!

[inkbybex]

All set up for GradEx! Now to grab some dinner and rest my aching wrist

[inkbybex]

Another throwback piece that I’m still pretty happy with!

[inkbybex]

Hi friend I’m looking forward to seeing your art 💕

Yay! I'm hoping to get a lot up soon. Just finishing up some reworked paintings for GradEx before I can start planning out some personal work