A few months ago my friend Adele from Dellie's Designs created an adorable little desk buddy download for her Patreon, as chronicled in this studio vlog here.
It was ridiculously adorable.
Then last month she released it new one. It was also ridiculously adorable.
And it was when I saw the second one, that I had an idea. One of my monsters would look utterly fantastic as a desk buddy.
So I reached out to Adele and asked her permission to copy her idea. And because she's a lovely, lovely person, she said yes.
So I drew Guy.
And then I drew Guy's back.
And then I played about with him a bit, and did some prototyping, and came up with this.
He is, as I predicted, utterly fantastic. And I decided you should all get to have a Guy on your desk too. So I made a free printable.
You can download a full size image for printing, right here on my store for absolutely nothing.
The process looks fairly simple: white drawing on black paper, outline with a light version of a colour, then again with a darker version of that colour.
So that's what I did.
Except it didn't look quite right. It's okay I guess, but I wanted to do better. Maybe the white wasn't thick or consistent enough? Maybe the blues weren't contrasting enough? So I got out some more paint pens.
Even if I accepted the neon bit, I couldn't get over the messy white line. So I tried drawing the colours first, then doing the white afterwards.
Then I switched colours and spent some time experimenting with different line thicknesses and methods.
Then I did even more doodling and swatching.
Now, that one on the bottom right there. the arc? There are two things I like about it. The nice consistent white line (even if it is a little thin), and the pencil halo.
That's the trick!
When you look at a lot of those videos, they don't show themselves using any pencil. But in some of them you can pause on the final image and see a pencil halo. And in this one by Celyn Haf, you can actually see the pencil being added.
So that's what I did. I drew my image in a light coloured paint pen - in this case purple. Then I outlined it in a darker purple. Then I added a halo in pencil. And finally, a thin white core.
It's not perfect, but I was happy to call this experiment concluded.
--
Now you'll notice that the dates on these art pieces are way back in January. This is because I have a bad habit of doing blog projects and not writing the blogs for months (sometimes even years). I'm writing this post in August and I thought I'd have another go at this glow neon effect.
Except that it didn't go too well.
I did manage to narrow down a white pen I like, and two blues.
I even established that drawing a monster was a waste of time. I'd just do something abstract.
Okay maybe not. I'm not the steadiest when following lines by hand. I HATE inking sketches I've done traditionally - what on earth made me think this would be easy?
I tried some straight lines.
Also nope. I was ready to give up. But I wanted to prove that the neon thing worked. So I grabbed my iPad.
I just used it as a canvas - no fancy digital art editing or anything. All I did that I couldn't have done with paper and pen, was use layers. Look, I even downloaded the time lapse for proof.
And it doesn't look too bad. But the unsteadyness of the lines did annoy me a little, so I went full digital. Outline tools and gaussian blur and everything.
And now I'm accepting that I'll never get the neon thing down and moving on.
