Droids Custom 2-1B: Beginning inks!

by Bill Cable
on 2022-12-14, 08:27:23

Made great progress on the 2-1B in the last week! I was able to squeeze in two sessions. In the first, I worked on the background...

Going for the first aid room at the prison. You can see elements from the Andor series... the door, obviously. The electrified floor. I did that floor by eye, and I think it turned out pretty fantastic. I know there's probably mathematical formulas to figure out the distance between lines to make a true square grid using two-point perspective, but I tried doing it without and it ended up looking like a flat floor. Bully for me!

I also drew the left arm with his medical wand.

Last night I sat down to do some more work. Looking at how things were coming along, I realized that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on below the cut-off line for the bottom of the cardback (which is going through 2-1B's foot). So I decided to go all-in, and shift everything down. This has happened with a few of my pieces before, but I don't recall any I've shifted this severely. In the end the only person who will have to deal with that is whoever ends up owning the original art.

Pencils done, it was time to lay down some ink.

You know... I've been using a proper pen and nib for my art since around 2000, when I drew my Cable Original Tusken Raider. But still, the physics of this thing mystifies me. I tried to get the ink to flow for a good 5 minutes, including watering down the ink a bit, with no success. I had to resort to replacing the nib completely. The old one flowed fine the last thing I drew. What happened? No clue. The new nib did have a really nice line, though.

After finishing up Kino Loy it was time to ink the star of this show, mister 2-1B:

Now that's a good-looking droid! All smooth even lines almost as if I know what I'm doing.

I feel like I'm in a good groove now, and I'm thinking I might power through the exam table and background this evening. So many straight lines, though. I'll probably have to go with a ruler and marker. I still haven't figured out how to make a straight line using a real pen. Maybe that's something I can look up on YouTube.