Pen and Ink Final Project in Photoshop

I spent a long time putting off writing the entry about my final Pen and Ink drawing, mending the wounded egos and crippled hands.  The first project from a month long break was a tough one, and as much as everyone loves an extended Winter Break, “re-entry” back into the workflow stinks.

This illustration is of the blood supply to the thyroid gland, located in the neck.  Generally I’m surprised at what I was able to achieve in the illustration, with no prior pen and ink experience and being an artist that prefers tonal drawings to line drawings.  In a perfect world, I would fix some of the flaws, but this is the state it is in for now.

Copying Masters, Getting Acquainted with a Tablet, and Surgery Games.

The spring semester has started (although nothing about all the snow in Chicago seems “spring” to me) and the projects are under way.  In Illustration Techniques, we’ve started learning the “pain”staking art of line drawing – both with traditional pen and ink, and in the computer, thanks to programs like Illustrator, Photoshop, and Painter.  To set the mood, we are practicing copying the works of some of the great Pen-And-Inkers.

This is my in-progress copy of a pen and ink illustration by Melloni in Photoshop.  And if you have a keen eye, you may have noticed a major change in the resolution of my screen capture: it’s huge!  Christmastime was good to me, and I splurged on a new laptop, switching from Mac to Windows (and shocking creative/artistic minds everywhere).

The beauty of this exercise is finally getting close to my Bamboo tablet, and some of the very cool features.  After a major driver update from the Wacom site, I discovered this gem:

OP 5 is a Wacom Tablet App that uses the tablet to play doctor.  Make incisions, replace hearts, mend bones, remove clots by drawing with your pen!  Needless to say, its a great tool to (ahem) refine your pen/tablet dexterity.  The Bamboo Dock (that came with the driver installation) has a ton of other fun time-wasters to play too.  Since this was medical themed, I couldn’t pass this up!