Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

I was trying to think of another thing to draw that was very, very black. Then I recalled the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I looked for a few images of it and most were more complicated settings and then I saw one from the movie looking up from the monolith as it partially obscurred the sun as the sun illuminated a sliver of the Earth. This was the TMA-1 monolith that was on the moon. Black paper was perfect for it, since the monolith was black, space was black, all but a sliver of the earth was black, and the sun was white (well, yellow-ish).

Looking at it more, I realized that space was black, but not as black as the monolith, as there was a visible edge to the utter blackness of the monolith. That's kind of a lot of black to be using and trying to distinguish since I'm only using black paper and white ink. And I'm terrible at drawing straight lines, let alone circles. I used the styrofoam ring aroud a DVD spindle case to be the planet (outer circle) and sun (inner circle), and some cardboard for the monolith lines. But that was using pencil. Tracing it with the a pen freehand is tricky, especially when the ink flow can be inconsistent. But it's just a quick sketch. Since it contains only a few elements, it doesn't take that long to draw, or rather to try to draw. So try I did. I think it's passable, though perhaps not iconically recognizable. We'll see. Full image is here.