Today's setup in my room, my drawing box, stand and the table lamp I got yesterday on my study desk in my room. Made myself a cup of coffee (see the green coffee cup on the left of the desk) by around 6:30am and by 9am I had had two rounds of the plunger coffee.
It was a bit of a struggle to get started but once I got going, it was great. I even ended up finishing two pages today, though my plan is to get one done every morning. Plus, they were quite technical too as they were reference heavy, a lot of F35 drawing (inside and outside), as you can see the picture below. Still not 100% happy with the outcome, with my level of skill with the pens – and on this particular page, I think I overdid the inks on the front of the plane where Calix is being shot out of the cockpit as Bri and him eject from the F35. But overall, I got what I was going for as I wrote in my script that I wanted to attempt a top view of the plane as the two are being ejected out. I had to watch a few youtube videos to get the technicalities right. (By the way, very crazy stuff. Imagine being shot out on your seat, while your plane is going at countless miles per hour hundreds or thousands of meters above the ground beneath you!)
Speaking of the inking at the front of the plane, I think the blackness there has become slightly distracting as I wanted the focus of this piece to be on Bri who is the pilot at the back as she is suspended in the air whereas the other pilot at the front is meant to serve as a background, just to add to the drama and chaos of this moment. This is the joy (or non-joy) of working with real ink pens on real paper. You cannot undo and re-do it again. But wait –– this has just reminded me, I have a white ink corrector!! I need to fix this and practise the art of the correction pen!
Here you go. This is slightly better. If need be, I can always work on adjusting the tones on the computer on Clip Studio Pro when I am adding the shades. I think this works better when the front pilot isn't distracting. I also toned down the area where the jet propels the plane forward. Again, that was drawing too much attention with the tone.
Now as I am winding up for the day with this work, I am listening to Casiopea my new favourite band. They always help me wake up and feel grounded in a strange way. Their style of music and the way they play is highly skilled but very real and grounded in real instruments and born out of tension between the hands, the body and the instrument – you can hear the finger picking on the bass, the analog sounds of the keyboards, the shimmer of the cymbals and the thud of the kick drum – again, life-givingly, not byte and computer signals in a digital device using pre-recorded sounds stored in its database at the command of a keypad but played with skill on real tools, together. Thank God for music. Thank God for the liveable reality.