Candy Skull Errors

In the run up to Hallow this year I drew a fairly basic ink drawing of a candy skull. I think the idea was OK but I crashed and burned on the execution. This is just one of those pieces that I couldn’t get right.

Here is the linework…

I tried to add some tone using pencils…

However, I really really disliked this. The sharp clarity of the ink lines clashed in a horrible way with the more expressive pencils. So I rubbed all of the tone out.

Then I scanned in my linework and added my tones digitally. This worked much more harmoniously with the linework…

However the execution was still poor since I had tried to tone this image really quickly and didn’t make a proper set of flats before getting into it. (“Flatting” an image is where you use various flat tones or colours to separate out sections of the picture for easy selection when actually painting.) I was feeling ill and wanted to tone this image quickly and skipped this step. With hind sight this was a terrible move since I ended up reselecting multiple selections multiple times by hand and making a bad job of it.

I didn’t even stop there – I then compounded my error by using the poorly executed digitally toned image as a basis for quickly adding some colour!

Overall, I think the biggest lessons I learned from all of this are to avoid creative work when I’m feverish and that “short cuts make long delays” Oh well, we all have rough spots from time to time! 🙄

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