Work continues on Sunnyville Stories #12. Besides my usual Speedball 513 nib, I’ve been using other pen points in my drawing as well as the Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph pens.
I’m quite pleased with how Rusty turned out here. There was a time that I avoided nib pens on the grounds that I thought they were messy. Thanks to Matt Madden, I now use them as my primary tool for drawing much like many other greats before me such as Bud Fisher, Elzie Segar, Charles Schulz and so on.
Rusty realizes here that this shopper he was interrogating is not a shopper at all. It’s actually a cigar store Indian! (It makes sense in context.)
For those of you not familiar, a cigar store Indian is a wooden statue used to advertise that a storefront carried tobacco products (cigars, cigarettes, pipes and so on). They are still used today but are more popular as decoration and collector items. This statue was drawn from photo reference; it took four sketches to get it down right.
As for inking the statue, that was a challenge. The outline was done with my usual Speedball 513 nib and the hatching in the eye with a .50mm Rapidograph. As for the woodgrain, that was very time consuming. I drew the top half of the statue with a Hunt 109 nib. It sadly gave out on me and the bottom half was done with a Hunt 103 nib. That is one of the advantages of nibs in contrast to the fixed-width pen points. They can give a variety of lines.
Sunnyville Stories Vol. 1 (ISBN 9780615653921) is still for sale on Amazon. Copies of Sunnyville Stories Volume 2 and Von Herling, Vampire Hunter are for sale right now at Great Stories. Check out Direct Textbook too for more details on my books! And if you have an Amazon Kindle, get Sunnyville Stories Volume 1, Sunnyville Stories Volume 2 and Von Herling, Vampire Hunter for it today!
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