A Night at DUNE
DUNE is a local group of indie cartoonists and illustrators who gather at Cafe Racer every third Tuesday where over the evening everybody does a page of art then you put down three dollars and it gets printed in the group’s monthly zine.
I try to go there at least every other month (for reasons I do not understand, third Tuesday is the most popular day in the month for organizers. The reason I don’t go as often as I’d like is I have a is on the same third Tuesday I have a choice between DUNE, a WordPress users group and a Photoshop users group at the Adobe Campus.
So it’s a great opportunity to hang with colleagues as well as challenge yourself by conceiving and executing a full page of fully inked art in under three hours. (to keep things interesting I prefer to limit myself to using a ten point marker) I find it’s the conception part that’s the most challenging part. No matter how many times I remind myself I should, I rarely go in with an idea. (or at least a good one) So I find myself spending the first hour desperately brainstorming, doodling page compositions, pouring through notes desperately trying to think of something. Partly because of this I find myself doing full page illustrations as I am to do a comic page.
Last time was no exception. I ended up recycling a picture of some trees from a series of thumbnails I’d done as a speed exercise. To make things interesting I made it the scene for a Fairy Ball. At the time I wasn’t completely happy with it. I had blocked out the pencils a little too quickly so I ended up inking a lot of the figures in the crowd freehand and even though these were minor details in the big picture, I walked away from it mostly unsatisfied, thinking it was sloppy. (one of those Artists can’t like their own work because they’ve been looking at it for too long things.) I was genuinely surprise when it got some of my best numbers on Instagram at the time.
So, having just got it back at last night’s Dune I thought I’d share. Can’t wait to show the one I did last night, it Rocked!
