ALH
Initials done for a friends birthday. Copic Multiliner SP 0.1mm & Black Faber Castell pencil. I suppose I should mention the graphite as well, which was a needle-sharp Staedtler mechanical 2mm (H).
I'm immensely proud of this one. It's the culmination of more time and effort I've ever spent on a single piece in my life so far. I tried a couple new things with this one, too. First, the shading, which I'll be incorporating into all future designs. And second, the use of multiple stitched photos to finally get the detail I've been craving in these digital representations.
All up it took quite a bit of time, as I said. I lost count sometime after forty hours.
The recipient of BN noted the inspiration of Hans Gigers fantastic artworks in his piece. I was ecstatic to hear this because Giger (pronounced geeger with two hard G's) is one of the (admittedly few) artists in which all my pieces and general art style has a default influence in. So this time I really went with it.
char limit :(
The third of several pages of ideas. With every new work I spend more and more time coming up with line forms before I'm happy.
I wasn't happy for a long time on this one.
After a few days and several ideas I was finally happy with an initial line form.
Final pencilwork begins. This was the second iteration, the first draft was messy and I wasn't happy with it for a long time. But this recurring theme of unhappiness didn't last much longer, once I started penwork I formed a final plan much more quickly.
Close up of the top of the A. Never done musculature before, idk why either cos it's really not difficult and even without the shading it looks great. I didn't want it to look too much like an actual shoulder arrangement since that bothered me too much.
"A" mostly done. Something new I tried with this one is shading with a black pencil (just a Faber Castell one). It came out really quite well and I'll be incorporating it on all future projects now. I had to (constantly) sharpen it to a needle point.
Skipping ahead once again to the L. Apologies for not getting really any initial penwork shots.
Several hours later and I had the initial pencilwork for the H done. It took me longer than it should have to decide on the Giger theme but not too long to actually form it.
Aaaaand done. My progress shots for this one were all over the place and I skipped sometimes ten hours at a time.
Close-up of the end of the H. I'm loving the new shading I'm doing from now on. It's so fresh and enjoyable to do.
Final, paper blemishes removed and levels adjusted in PS. Thats not all, though. For ALH I actually took multiple close-up shots and stitched them all together in PS. ALH (the original) is by far my highest resolution representation at ~8K x ~11K pixels.