January 8th, 2010
hungry ghost
brush pen and EF Rotring pen
©2010, 2012 Pam Bliss

I don’t know why I think of this guy as a hungry ghost, except that I love the phrase.  He actually looks less hungry than he does insanely cheerful, like the host of a particularly squealy game show.  Of course the way you can see the background through his wide open mouth might scare off some of the advertisers.

To be more serious, this example illustrates another of the advantages of doing an extended project like the drawing of the day.  I found it while I was skimming through the pile of sketchbooks looking for examples of spirals inked freehand with a brush.  The art for “tea”, which is going to be mostly brushwork, needs Asian inspired spirals and curved strokes to represent heat and steam, and I was wondering if I already had a spiral that would work in my artistic vocabulary.  Unfortunately, I don’t– the lines I need will be much thicker and more round than oval.  I might even have to (*gasp*) pencil them first rather than let them evolve into the fingertip shapes my freehand spirals naturally take.

So here are some great examples of spirals as I usually draw them.  Which, for the purposes of the current project, is wrong.  This is, of course, how you learn– if you never draw anything wrong, you’ll never draw anything new.