Midnight Mass Inktober Doodle

This is a relatively quick sketch I did as a homage to Netflix’s Midnight Mass, a limited series I just finished and LOVED. Loved it so much in fact that I also took the opportunity to write an article about its connection with Rick Strassman’s DMT: the Spirit Molecule for The Daily Grail —here’s the link if you wanna check that out.

It was also a chance to practice my ‘analog’ drawing and inking skills, as many artists do so on this particular month which has been named as Inktober among the online artistic community. Making art with digital tools is amazingly fun but overtime you start to take a lot of things for granted –like the fact that you can always undo the last thing you did and quickly correct mistakes.

Making art in ‘meatspace’ does NOT grant you that luxury, so if you make a mistake or a bad decision, you might end up ruining the piece completely. This can be really daunting for those of us accustomed to the digital safety net, so Inktober is a chance to be bold and practice the skills everybody who learned how to draw with pencil and papers grew up with.

The piece was mostly done with the Pentel pocket brush pen highlighted in the photo, but I also took the opportunity to bring out the Tachikawa Japanese nibs I bought for my birthday. Inking with traditional nibs is something I’ve been wanting to try for a while, and it will definitely be a steep learning curve –the nib I picked, for instance, was way stiffer than I expected despite it being the bigger one in the set I acquired– but one I’m looking forward to take.

I also got me some watercolor brushes and thick cold pressed paper suitable for inkwash work. If inking with real nibs is daunting for a digital artist, painting with real brushes is even more so! Let’s see what kind of trouble I get myself into 😉

Oh, and remember –Midnight Mass is THE shit!

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