Inktober 2021, Day 14: Tick

Boom! With this post, I am completing two weeks of Inktober and two weeks of posting every single day! Yay! As long as I maintain my rhythm and process, I am confident I can pull off the other two weeks and the three days as well. However, I am running on two cups of insanely strong coffee a day only to stay awake the number of hours I need to work on this. I don’t feel this is healthy or sustainable for me for longer than a month. I am impressed with people who can do this for extended periods. They probably have some superpowers!

Tick was the theme of the day. After thinking about all kinds of ticks for a while, I arrived at ticking bombs. And since last year I already created CS:GO inspired artwork for one of the prompts, I thought why not give it a shot and work on the C4 bomb from the game. After some sketching about, and not knowing how exactly to go about it, at a certain angle the countdown display looked like a mouth to me, which is when I decided to give the animated bomb character a go. There certainly are other cartoony bombs out there, but this one’s my attempt at it. I think it turned out pretty cute.

My C4 is having a giggle session and holds its button belly with its wire hands. I also added a little heart blinker/ticker on it instead of the regular round light indicator. It made more sense since the bomb is alive. I mostly lined it using Pigma Micron fine liner 03 and used the brush pen only at the outer outline to have a bit more thickness there. The shading was done with Diamine jet black drawing ink. I used the red watercolor on the rosy cheeks and the heart and the white Gelly Roll fine liner 08 on the highlights and the pattern of the notes.

The drawing itself is tiny, and I have to say, sometimes it is harder to work on such tiny pieces than the big ones. There is only so much space on it. Every detail counts and is immediately visible. I took it extremely slow since my hands are not always the best at not shaking.