Firstly, a big thanks to everyone who sent me a “like” following the last post about the Dragster drawing and its blank rider. As ever, it’s always so encouraging to receive positive responses from viewers. If I haven’t yet, I will be visiting your sites too, to check out all of the creativity happening on WordPress and elsewhere and hopefully reciprocating in the spread of good karma.

You will see from the drawing above that not everything is going down the “leave bits blank” route, and so currently this one is much more like many that have come before. But it isn’t finished yet. What you see today is more of a progress update than a finished drawing. I whizzed off a quick scan for the blog without cleaning any of it up so it’s riddled with pencil lines and various other bits and pieces. Although the differences are sometimes subtle, this one is done on Fabriano drawing paper (200 gsm) rather than my preferred Bristol Board. The surface of the paper is much softer than the board and so the fine biro pen interacts with it differently. It is much harder to achieve the very fine line work for delicate tones on the one hand but, creates a kind of broken texture in the cross-hatching on the other hand. You do get a bit more ink build up on the nib of the pen so it’s a good idea to always have a tissue handy for keeping the pen as clean as you can. Overall the result is good though, so the paper has passed this part of the test. The next bit will be to see how it deals with direct sketching in pen. If there is a downside, it is the fact that this paper is only available in A4 and A3 sizes, so getting into some larger drawings will require  me to find a different paper. I’m on to that already.

What’s going to happen in order to finish it? Well, there are a couple of new ideas that I’m trying out now which I hope will provide the answer to that question. It will be a new direction that’s for sure and I’ll post about it very soon.

Lastly today, here for your amusement, is the second cartoon I bashed out the other day over a cappuccino whilst contemplating our inability to read things properly, take things seriously and exercise our sense of humour.