SKETCH CARDS
I thought I'd give 'Inktober' a second chance a couple of years ago (having participated the year before to very 'meh' results)... It's a lot of work with little to no payoff, but all of the Instagram artists were doing it. For those of you not familiar with it, Inktober is a daily drawing challenge created by super-art-boy Jake Parker that takes place in October. Artists are challenged to draw a picture once a day for the entire month using ink and paper (though I've seen a lot of cheating with Wacoms and iPads). I guess there are daily themes you're supposed to follow, but I'm not into that; everybody just sort of draws the same stuff, and I don't like opening my Instagram feed and seeing 8,000 drawings of Storm from the X-Men because today's theme was 'Weather'. So I chose to draw some of my favorite video game boss battles.
In any case, I gave up about 15 days in because, as it turns out, it's a real pain in the butt with (like I said) little to no payoff. You get some likes on Instagram, maybe some new followers... But what does that really mean? But whatever, it's a fun exercise if you have the time and patience. I've got kids to feed, though.
(Row 2) Super Mario Bros 2 (USA), The Legend of Zelda, Legacy of Kain: Defiance, Kid Icarus
(Row 3) Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!, Rise of the Triad, Contra, 1943
(Row 4) Pro Wrestling, Doom II, Descent
This was sort of a precursor to the Video Game Boss Battles I had done for Inktober. The year before, I had been messing around drawing on sketchcards; some were okay, most were crap. Sketchcards and Copics seem to be the big thing in the Instagram art world, and I wanted to fit in. Needless to say, I went back to digital art pretty quickly, but not before cranking out a few items that I could say I was proud of. Similar to the boss battle cards, these specifically focused on one of my all-time favorite NES games: CONTRA.
A few years back, I got on a kick of re-reading old pre-Disney Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (a thousand times better than the crap Disney has been churning out as of late). My goal with every book was to sketch a character from it when I was finished and keep it in the book to be used as a bookmark for the next time I or anyone else decided to read it. Personally, I think it's a fun motivator to read more.
