A much closer look at the Featured Image of the Week:

It began with a concert. I have heard Robbie speak of the Scabs and even heard a few of their songs. It wasn't the same as actually seeing and hearing them play. At one point I saw a poster on the wall. The caption read, "It's your world, we're just here to rock the shit out it." The poster was black and white and something about it intrigued me. I wanted to attempt a recreation. So I had Robbie take a picture.

STEP 1:
I began with a simple pencil sketch of the whole thing. I like to do most of my ink drawings without an underlying sketch or guidelines but this was a special case. I wanted to get it right. So I grabbed a pencil and lightly drew it all out. I didn't exactly get it perfect. There are a few elements missing from my drawing. I drew the heads to close together in one area and had to sacrifice an arm holding a gun. For the most part I followed the original pretty well. I then took a picture of it because I had already spent about an hour and I knew this was going to take a few hours more to complete. I thought a step-by-step might be interesting to you all.

STEP 2:
The drawing in step 1 above was hard to show. I had to crank the contrast way up to make the light pencil lines actually show. The actual drawing was barely visible. However, another hour of work and I had the pen outlines for the people, the letters and a beginning on the dots drawn. I was relatively happy with the progress so far but I was dreading the enormous number of dots I was about to lay down. I didn't have the energy at that time so I took another picture and put it away for a while. Besides, Aidan was fussing around me and I didn't want him to "bump" me when I'm working with pen. You can erase a pencil mistake but with pen, mistakes are permanent!

STEP 3:
Ah, now we're getting somewhere on this. I have tried to use "shortcuts" when filling in large areas of ink. None of them have worked well so far. A fat pen will have a slightly different ink and it will look weird. So I took my little pen and filled it all in by going back and forth over areas in a systematic way. I do that because although you can't see it in this scan, on the original, you can see my pen strokes. I do it in a pattern consistent with the thing I'm drawing. You can also see I started a few tests of the watery area of the drawing.

 

AND THE FINAL STEP 4!
Here it is, the final drawing. Man, that was a lot of dots! What got me to finally finish this was I found myself taking care of Aidan while Connie was in class. He wanted to watch "George of the Jungle" for the hundredth time and I put it in to shut him up. I have no interest in watching it but I wanted to sit next to him so I grabbed the book and pen and figured this is as good a time as any for mindless dot making. For the next 90 minutes he enjoyed the movie while I went tap tap tap.

So now I'm finally finished but I have a few more things I'd like to do with this drawing. I'm going to take it to a T-shirt place sometime soon and see if I can make a T-shirt transfer out of it. I know that's easy because I've drawn things for church T-shirt sales in the past. My challenge is seeing if I can make a print using specialty paper. I'm not sure how to do that so some research is in order. Once I have that, I'll matt it to a standard frame size and give it to Robbie. If this works as I hope, I have a way overdue project for Hobie that will be next on my art project list. I'll have until April to get that done.