Finished Pennywise the clown from "IT" artwork!

Good morning, Steemit! I just dropped @guthrie off at school. It’s a great feeling to be sitting down to a Steemit post this early in the morning. I love being able to make two blog posts in one day and mornings like this are the only way it happens. I have a ton of editing to get through and a possible lunch with a Steemit friend, so I most likely won’t have a chance to draw today. I did, however, want to share some drawing I fit in yesterday. You can see some of the process in my @dlive post “Art therapy at @caffetto drawing Pennywise! LIVE NOW!”.

@guthrie is obsessed with IT at the moment […the reboot from 2017, not the original]. I am and always have been a diehard horror enthusiast, but I wasn’t excited for the new interpretation of IT. It has been my son that’s drawn me in to see how brilliant this film is. He’s not allowed to watch the movie […for obvious reasons], but we do watch trailers and featurettes together before bed. We came across one that took a behind the scenes look at the actors, including commentary by Bill Skarsgård; Pennywise the clown.

I’ve come around on IT. It really is a special horror film. In my opinion, it does a much better job than the original […which may be another reason it took me a while to warm up to this new one; I wasn’t crazy about the 1990 film]. All the Pennywise excitement in our home and a longing to keep drawing as I’m trying to mentally prepare to transition to comics full time, I decided it was time to draw a demonic shapeshifting clown that eats children.

I started with rough pencils on a colored background. I used reference from Google images, which you can see on the @dlive live stream replay. One of the things I love most about the iPad Pro is the ability to do split screen while drawing in Procreate. It’s made a huge improvement in my drawings and streamlined my processes of using reference. I do struggle with expression quite a bit, but surprisingly, Pennywise’s evil face carried over on the first draft.

I played around with color, which isn’t one of my strongest skill sets. I come from a background of pen and ink and wash from my years in art school. Of the many mediums of visual art, comics have always been my favorite. I like pencils and inks. When colors come in to play, I prefer them to look like comic book pages with proper flatting and distinct edges. I romanticize that I can do digital painting like @beekart, @justmousepixels and @joxus, but when I try, I veer back to colors that are laid down behind deliberate comic book style inking.

Learning […and experimenting] with color is something I’ll keep doing. I want to have all the tools to do a comic from it’s earliest stages to a finished book […including writing], but I have to admit, of all these stages of this drawing, the faint pencils and finished inks is my favorite. It’s the @kommienezuspadt that’s still stuck in the 90’s, yearning to achieve what Todd McFarlane and Greg Capullo did with Spawn. Still, though, I’m happy with how this Pennywise turned out…especially considering I started it just for fun.

Thanks for reading. For more comics, illustration, photography and the stories behind the work, follow me here @kommienezuspadt!