Inking in the Outline

My next step, once I got everything in its proper place, is to ink in the outline. I am doing the whole portrait in ink because 1. its not thick like black paint 2. it blends really smoothly 3. it dries flat and doesnt show brush strokes. So basically Im going over all the lines I already drew, but with a bottle of ink and a very fine tipped brush. This actually took me most of the day to finish because this picture is huge and there is a lot of detail to it. Eleven days until opening night at the Rothick Arthaus!

On this day in 2008, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn passed away. I hope this portrait will both honor his accomplishments and inform more people about who he was and the relentless stand he took against the Soviet Union.

Tools of the trade.



You can see there is an area I still have to do on his chest. Im adding a flower in there and I just haven't figured out how I want to do it...



Detail shot of the sleeve after inking in the outlines. Can you find a penguin, a polar bear, a whale, and a map?

A Complex Drawing

Now that I got all the pages pasted on a board, my next step is to start drawing Aleksandr. It was a full day just to get the outline and placement correct, and another half day for his shoulder. By the evening of the first day I was getting pretty tired and should've called it quits. Instead I got the idea to shade in the dark areas with a light ink wash so I could get a feel of how it will look. Afterward, I had to paste a few pages over the areas that should have stayed the page color...oops.

Penciled in the outline, and started to wash it with ink. Even there I had already painted over vital highlights. A few pages pasted over fixed it pretty easy though. You can also see the shoulder here is still pretty basic.



Finished shading the big areas. These will be black. Although it was a bad idea, at least you can see what it will kind of look like... its hard being patient.



His shoulder has so many little parts to it. It took me a long time and a lot of erasing to get it to look accurate and correctly shaped.