Inktober 2021, Day 18: Moon

Day 18 prompt was - moon. I am not going to lie, I have been enjoying the last few days since I am a sucker for space and universe themes! Is that any secret by now? However, I feel myself getting even more tired and slower. I also felt the need to do justice to these themes I love so much, so I am putting in extra effort to get there. It means scrapping the works where I feel I have made a misstep and deviated from where I wanted it to go. I scrapped one for the moon too. At the same time, the scrapped version helped me find the needed effect, so nothing was lost.

I wanted to work on the alternative version of our Moon. I spent a bit of time staring at this reference photo, wondering what elements make the Moon Mooney, staring at the various crater shapes. Damn, that porcelain surface is a masterpiece! So captivating no wonder I can never get enough staring at it through a telescope too.

I started with a sketch that included the main craters and then outlined the dark ones with a Pigma brush pen. I have to mention since the previous post my brush pen is pretty much ruined too. There are loose bristles and all! I will need to order a bunch of new ones.

I then proceed with adding the mane shading in the dark craters and of the whole surface using the Diamine jet black drawing ink. And the next step was to draw the white craters. Here comes the failed version. In it, I used the white Gelly Roll liner 08 only to draw them. The result did not pack the needed punch. It was patchy and chaotic. It is where I wondered about what if I used acrylic white color as a base and added the Gelly Roll on top? I redid everything up until the white craters and did just that. It worked! They even have a bit of relief!

Finally, I scattered some smaller craters all over the surface and did a bit of additional shading pattern in the darker areas using Pigma Micron fine line 03.