Music Hog and Spider

Still busy this week so I thought I'd feature, "Music Hog" in this blog post. (I may change the title at some point.) It was one of three drawings I did, before I began my blog, so it only made a brief appearance but this particular image had been floating around in my head for possibly over two years. It was one of the contributing factors that got me drawing these skeletons and back to drawing in general, so I thought it deserved a bit of acknowledgement. I feel that a blog could be a little boring if the focus was only on "the process" so I'll throw something else in. The return to drawing will probably be the subject for another blog if I keep things going for long enough.


Like all my pieces this one began life as a rough sketch, only this one took several hours before it started to look right, specifically because sources were minimal and made the ribcage difficult to perfect. I had to redraw it over and over again and, when erasing it in-between failures, would have to carefully go around the skull and its tusks every time. I hate that rib cage.
Eventually I was able to transfer it to A2. So I started working early, as usual, and by mid day was making good progress when a dot appeared in the middle of the paper. I peered closer to find it was a tiny spider which had abseiled down from the top of the easel. Thinking it would be the humane thing to assist in relocating the little dude, I unhooked the line and lifted it away from the paper, spider still attached. But suddenly, spider was not attached. So I sat back down to resume work. Then a familiar dot very slowly inched it's way down over the paper. So I extended a finger to unhook the line and Spider tuned and scrabbled back up, disappearing over the top of the easel. Again I tried to resume working and again spider inched slowly down in front of my face. Things repeated this way for a few minutes longer until the little dude was successfully removed and hooked onto the edge of a desk.
By the end of the day Hog was drawn in pencil and partially outlined in ink.

I had to take sooo many photos to get him in frame...not sure if you can really make him out though

All preped for inking

The following day was spent inking the image. Shading the tucks was the scariest part as they are large and obvious and if I made a single mistake it would be equally as large and obvious. Shading the dead phones was really fun though.

The close up just made me aware that the photos aren't giving a sence of skale

Looks kinda small....its longer than my arm.