Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Student Spotlight: Thinking In Ink

For his final Thinking In Ink project, Laurence Maslon caricatured me in homage to his favorite comic from childhood, Not Brand Ecch. I was doubly honored by this because that was also MY favorite comic as a child. It was the cartooning there by the great Marie Severin that inspired me to become a cartoonist.

Check out this impressive haul of student work I collected in the inaugural semester of Thinking In Ink this past spring. We had fun practicing with brush feathering, hatching with nibs, working with outlines, working without lines, and experimenting with ink wash, spot color layers, non-traditional tools, and stencils, among other things. 

We made comics, illustrations, studies from photographs, observational drawings, and more:
Laurence Maslon's brush and ink sketch of his dog, Ruby.
Anne Keating's crosshatch study of a zombie plush doll
Julie Cleveland's sensitive-line drawing of a jawbone and plaster cast.
Maslon's tone-map design for a film-noir poster, ...
...and an ink wash study for another.
Lynn Bernstein added spot color to her high contrast study of William Powell,...
...and this hatched illustration of Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan. 
Anne Keating rubricated her Tarot card design.
Julie Cleveland finished a poster with wash and a dash of color.
Laurence Maslon cut a stencil merging shadows for an image of The Shadow himself.

Anne Keating carved stencils of seashells and airbrushed them in Photoshop,... 

...and she invented a method of drawing with a wine cork.


More examples can be seen in the catalog entry for the course at SVA.
It's satisfying and fun playing around with materials, trying out techniques, exploring creative strategies, thinking in ink. Who says an inking class has to be good? "I says," sez Mot.

My online classes are starting soon: Figure Drawing for Cartoonists, Thinking In Ink, and Cartooning Basics.
Broaden your skills this summer, from home.