The blacks are basically all in here. I’ll add a little more with a pen before I start shading but that will be minor stuff. I turned up the contrast on this scan so I could get a sense of what the illustration would look like in just black and white.

Background blacks finished. On to the figure.

One of the more challenging parts of designing a new creature is finding new places to put the stitches. It’s obvious that the Frankensteins are chemists not surgeons. And it’s also pretty obvious that they have a thing for weird ugly scars. It takes effort to be this sloppy.

Sometimes the initial sketch takes the longest amount of time. In the case of this piece the inking was the most time consuming – lots of black. I suppose someday, when I’m in a hurry, I’ll resort to putting down outlines for where I want black and then filling in the darkness in Photoshop. I’ll be sad when that happens. I like having physical drawings that are finished in their own right.

This is my latest contribution to the A Patchwork of Flesh illustration blog. Or it will be once it’s finished. I did this sketch during a particularly dead day at the Day Job a month or so ago. Dead days are rare things there these days.

Coop at Patchwork asks people to send in 2.5″ x 3.5″ illustrations. That’s a great size to work at when you want to get a piece done quickly but it doesn’t leave a lot of room to play around. So I decided to do a larger illustration, cut it up and then send him the pieces. That seemed like a good Frankensteinian idea. I’ve been waiting to start posting this series until Coop got all the pieces in the mail. That happened today so …

I did a new illustration for A Patchwork of Flesh and Coop has begun posting it. I’ll be doing a follow up here once he get all the parts up.