Mousie and Chicken: Inktober drawings now a book

I’m a few months late showing off my Inktober pictures, but I have more than just sketches: I made a whole BOOK! A real, physical, hold-it-in-your-hands and hopefully spend money on it book!

And you can buy it!

Mousie and Chicken has all my themed Inktober 2018 drawings (there were a few days when I sketched something else), plus a few extras added to make it a better book.

When I started Inktober, I wanted to do small unrelated drawings based on the basic 2018 Inktober prompts, so that I could do them quickly and without stress. That worked for drawing number one. By drawing two things were getting a bit more ambitious. By drawing three I clearly had a story, and from then I was sunk: My little Mousie was off on an adventure. Each drawing still fits the prompt, but they add up to a story.

My beloved read to me while I drew, and he read a lot. Some drawings, like ‘Thunder’, took as much as three hours. Erik was my second set of eyes when I was laying out the book, too, and he was a great one.

Since I was working on these drawings everywhere I went, I used a really simple set of tools: a basic mechanical pencil, a Pigma Graphic 3 chisel-tip felt pen for solid black areas, a white Gelly Roll pen for details on black (and for mistakes), and my new favorite drawing pen: the Pentel Arts Hybrid Technica. C’mon, Pentel, gimme that sweet endorsement money. I had a couple of smear issues when I was impatient, but the quality of the black and the smooth feel of the pen are both fantastic. It comes in a variety of sizes. I used the 0.5mm — it’s a nice mid-range pen that could do everything I needed.

Everything in the book is made with those pens. I even hand-wrote the copyright notice.

I tried a bunch of different compositions and got a lot of practice with the same characters, without having to sit down and do a boring character sheet. I’m thrilled by the the final product, and by the project — I really moved forward in my drawing and inking this year, which is what Inktober is all about!

Plus, I drew a chicken with champagne burps. That is definitely one of the high points of my art career.