Commissioned at Anthrocon 2023 Artist Alley by  thehotrodhero

Here we find three members of the Copper clan: Maisy (age 10), Bess (age 26) and Donna (age 60) having a relaxing afternoon fishing, and Maisy is the first to get a bite. Or maybe she was the first one to begin casting in earnest, under the watchful eye of her elders. Donna makes her first online appearance here as according to the commissioner, nobody's drawn her yet.

Technical:
It's been a loong time since I've done any work in real-media, and this piece marks maybe the first one I've done in a year. Given the constraints of being in the Artist Alley only on Friday and Sunday, I labored to get this one ready for ink by the end of the day. One tool I wish I had carried would have been my light table, as I not only would I be able to easily check for asymmetry (by looking through the back of the page), but I could skip the laborious process of cleaning up the sketch and simply go straight to the working pencils.

On Saturday, the day I didn't get into the Alley, I took a seat in the Zoo (which was just outside the exhibition hall where the dealer's room, artist alley and Art Show were held) with a sub-set of my usual tools and set about to ink this one. I realize now that this came together significantly faster than usual since I was drawing three characters in one scene, something I din't think I've done as an AA commission. And I was now going to ink three characters...with a brush. Yes, I went very old-school and did extreme analog inking with a bottle of India ink, a size 0 brush, and a little container of water to rinse the brush. Mustering up a few years of experience I embarked upon this task with a new set of instructions--take off your glasses and get real close. Why? to closely monitor line quality and wetness of the brush.

You see, as the brush starts to run out of ink, the lines start to get lighter. The bristles still lay down ink, but it becomes more see-through. The end effect on the scan is linework of inconsistent darkness, so I went back to the inkwell more frequently than I had in the past. Also, as the brush is drained of ink, some of it wicks up into the top of the bristles and dries there, stiffening the brush. You don't want this since the bristles' flexibility is key to being able to pull out smooth curves, so I also rinsed out the brush more frequently. Lastly, I used scrap paper to test the amout of ink the freshly replenished brush was going to put down when it hit the paper. Sometimes there is too little, sometimes there is too much, and hitting the scrap paper first will save you from accidentally putting down too much ink, leaving lines that are too heavy for the lineweight you need. The end effect of all this is almost no need for retouching of the scanned image, as everything was nicely dark, with no areas of grey and no fuzzy lines to smooth out. Probably the only thing I did was to edit out the fine lines of the fishing rods where they passed through the rings holding the reels and loops.

One spot I didn't trust my brush skills with is the fishing rods and reels, which called for a 0.2mm tech pen, which I drew across the page in an effort to get the smoothest line on Maisy's rod, bent under the force of the fish she's hooked, and with a ruler for Bess and Donna's rods. Tech pen was also used for their fishing reels, with Maisy having a simple spincasting reel, and Bess/Donna's more sophisticated spinning reels.

Pencil on bristol, inked with india ink +size 0 paintbrush. Scanned at-con using the Canon Lide25 and Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. Project ID# 515.