Hacktober Revival: Deneb and The Tala

The second Hacktober drawing that I began a few years ago and only finished now.

This guy is the leader of the alien schmucks from the movie Killers From Space (1954). The Tala is the goof on the monitor, he rules all of Astron Delta, the planet where these pathetic space killers come from.

I like drawing horror/SF losers and these poor slobs are some of the biggest losers in low-budget genre junkdom. They couldn't even straighten their egg carton eyeballs out. I mean, come on. Google-eyes isn't scary. Everyone knows that. It's like an episode of The Outer Limits made by children at crafts camp.

I'm using these things as warmups when I do a stretch at the drawing board. My line is a little iffy some days, so I let these pinups suffer any shakiness I'm having when I start working a shift at the board. I'm also using them to try to get reacquainted with some art supplies I haven't used in years, mostly dip pens/nibs. I really miss traditional pen and ink. There's something about the line quality, the way the nib makes marks. I've been thinking about working with my G-pens and vintage Hunt 102/22s. I haven't used a dip pen in many years, on this pinup I mostly used a nib for the lines making up the cave background. If I ever catch up on things I'm going to haul the pen nibs out again and really work with them on something. Brush pens and the like are swell, but there's nothing like actual ink and steel on paper, it's just more satisfying to work with and feels more natural to me.

I think I have two more of these old Halloween pieces, maybe three, that are WIP. Hopefully they'll afford me some time to play around with the old equipment. I also need to practice using a brush to lay down white ink. The Pentel Jumbo pen is terrific for large cover ups, white gel pens are good for some details and small corrections, but the brush works best for a lot of corrections and textures. I saw Junki Ito using white ink with a Maru Pen on the Manben show and I would like to try something like that -- I used to dip a Hunt 102 into white ink back in the early 90s to make white line details or write in white on black and it was never very effective. I always had to rework the lines and then flix areas that didn't work with a thin rapidograph. One day I'll learn to reverse black and white digitally, as far as making white text on black.

Anyway, I miss some of the old tools and have been thinking about them a lot lately. I wish I wasn't so disorganized and behind on everything, I'd just spend some time playing around with different pen nibs and see what comes of it.