Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

Another white ink/black paper drawing and this time it doesn't involve skeletons. But the dark paper suggests dark themes and I wanted to try a freehand drawing of the Incubi from the 2009 independent movie Ink (a movie I really liked, with cool visuals, music, story, and more). The Incubi are the stuff of nightmares—actually, it's the reverse. The Incubi are the ones that give people nightmares. They are shadowy and usually project a black and white image of their face onto a screen in front of their face. They often have a rictus smile on their faces, and while their eyes are visible when they wear their masks, without them, they have glasses that project a pure cold white.

It translates well to a black and white drawing. I used a still image from the movie as a reference and drew it pretty quickly. This time I drew a quick sketch in pencil to help with the blocking. It was kind of hard to see on the black paper, without using a flashlight. Painting in the white background was a little tedious and used a lot of the wide tip white pen. This time I didn't threshold the reference image, I was just using the stock one. There aren't a lot of shadows in it that aren't simply the bodies of the Incubi as they skulk through the brightly lit halls of a hospital. I'm hoping it catches the feel of the image even if it's not perfect. I'm starting to experiment with using white highlights to suggest textures on clothing as well as the sort of halo-like glow around the glasses that dimly illuminates some parts of the faces of some of them. Here's the full size images.