 how do you draw a dark how oh oh how how h uh how do you draw a dark fantasy rpg illustration directly with ink without any pencil the method i've created for making art over the last few years can appear a bit like magic but everything i do is actually based on comic book fundamentals, you know, penciling, sketching, all that jazz. But through the years of working more and more directly with ink, I've gotten to a point where I can do more and more of the penciling in my mind's eye, sort of virtual penciling. But in 2020, when I got hired to work on the art for outcast Silver Raiders, the dark occult fantasy RPG that's currently kicking ass in its final days on Kickstarter, linked below in the video description if it's not too late. I had already found great success doing the concert art drawings and the daily ink monsters directly with ink, but I didn't have the confidence to do a more traditional fantasy illustration in that same way. Now at that point, penciling wasn't something I did daily anymore because my time was usually spent on the daily ink monsters. So going back to penciling felt good, but it also resulted in a bit stiffer style than I had hoped for. So half way through the project, I decided to hell with it. Why don't I just do these illustrations as if they were ink monsters? Why don't I just start doing the direct ink style and incorporate the random ink blots and try to make it exciting, make it feel alive? And you know, that style certainly looks good on quick time lapses, but there are a lot of ups and downs with it as well and I thought maybe one of the best ways to show is to actually sit down and talk my way through a drawing complete from start to finish and show you. So here you go, this is how it's done. For Outcast Silver Raiders, I get these short descriptions from Isaac to the writer and these layouts. Now here you see a double page and this is the area where the art will be and that is roughly the size of a normal sheet of paper, the format of a normal piece of paper, so we're just going to draw it like that. The description I got is a warlock, an overconfident, lacy, demonic character, summoning up the infernal flames of hell, throwing them at their hapless enemy, at this case an outmatched man in armor. So that's Now I've done a few different thumbnails on how to solve this drawing and the drawing for the next page and I don't always do these thumbnails, but whenever there's more complex composition and I don't necessarily see it clearly in my head, I tend to think they help. In order to show you what I thought, I thought I'd give you a little brief pencil sketch. So I'm not going to use the pencil in the process itself, but I'm going to use it just to sort of describe what I'm thinking. So I'm thinking the man in armor here, losing his sword and then the flames coming up like this and then the sorcerer with an outstretched hand sort of lifting up the flames and his cape falling like this and heavy shadows on him and all of this will be black. So that's my general thought. The way, now first I'm going to be using, let's see the paper, it's a Fabriano studio watercolor. It's 300 grams thickness. The size is 22.9 times 30.5 centimeters. So that is a shitty size because it's slightly bigger than my scanner, but that's okay. I can scan them in two pieces. I will be using regular Indian ink from Talans. I love that ink. I'm going to be using Daylor Rowney's acrylic ink for red and I'm going to be using some golden fluid acrylics for touch up. So the touch ups are, the reason I use the golden is that it simply covers a lot better than regular acrylic ink or white ink of any sort of kind. And I use the black acrylic to do corrections on top of the white acrylic because ink doesn't stick very well to acrylic. It sticks pretty okay to the Daylor Rowney acrylic ink, but not to the fluid acrylic. So the way that we're going to be using random elements here is I know my composition, but there's a lot of room to make it slightly different. Now with the flames I know I need to have them in a direction and that will, it will sort of be random in some sense. But the characters are the elements that I want some, I want some luck. I want some guidance from the fates. So I'll start by, there's not enough acrylic ink left. So I'll start by doing the basic shape of the armoured character and then the basic shape of maybe this is the cape. And then I'll take a tissue paper and I'll dab, dab, dab, dab, dab, dab. Oh, I messed that one up. And I messed this one up. And this is not going to make a whole lot of difference, but it's going to influence the rest of the drawing. And that tiny little influence, that tiny little element of luck is what I'm after. And that's one of the things you don't really get when you're doing a more planned process. So here I'm seeing that this to me looks like, maybe this is, here is clearly a pauldron. And this is clearly the hand. And this looks like a bit of the cheek of a man. And then this is the helmet. And some reflection on the helmet. And this is just the light. Okay, that looks decent to me. This is clearly the cape or the robe of the wizard, the sorcerer, the warlock, I guess. So the arm comes out here. And he's doing the cloy, warlock-y hand pose, like this. And then have him half covered in, now he's, I thought that this could be the face, but if I pull him up a little bit higher, then that looks more, more overconfident. He's going to have a knife in this hand because all the magic in the game is blood magic. So he has to bled a little to cast his spell. This is just the robe flying out. So because of the random elements of the ink, I do these tiny tweaks to my original idea, my original composition. These tweaks could have just as easily been made in the penciling process, but there's something more exciting and direct about doing it this way. One of the things that I love about doing art directly with ink is the ability of the art to, now I'm concentrating because I started right bang on one of the hard elements. It doesn't have to be that hard. Now one of the things that I love about drawing directly with ink is that it has the ability to surprise me as the artist. So when I do works that are heavily planned and penciled and sketched the hell out of, then I know how I want them to look long before they're finished and it's just a matter of how close can I get to that image I had in my head. Now with these, because of the random bits of ink, the random bits of ink that just tweaked slightly the angle of the tilt of the head and how he's holding his body and his hand just did these tiny, tiny tweaks to how I perceive the image in my mind and because of that I'm able to surprise myself and it's more fun. I get to discover the art in sort of the same way that you are getting to discover it right now and that is, that's fun, hopefully. Now there's also risk associated with this of course because it's a lot bigger chance to mess up. The planned approach is a lot safer but again that's some of the stuff that I like about this. I feel more alive when I risk everything, when I'm always that close to failure. That also means it's a more exhausting way of drawing, so if I sat down and did the classic penciling and inking and did it by the books like that, I could sit down and draw for loads of hours straight but with this approach it's a lot harder to keep the focus without becoming tired and sloppy and if you're sloppy then you fail. It's sort of like I used to love playing Minecraft when, I think this was back before Minecraft was in 1.0, I think it was still in beta and I didn't really have time to put into a game that you can play eternally. So what I did is that I played on hardcore so if I messed up and died the game would delete the world I was building and that made, that forced me to play for a lot shorter sessions because if I played for a long time I would start getting sloppy and would easily die and every time I died in Minecraft hardcore it was after going like, yeah I should probably stop now no no no just five more minutes five more minutes and then that was the famous last words. Okay so I'm going to, I'm using the sheet of paper to split the hairs of the brush so I get these very nice broken lines that are full of action and life and I'm going to use that on the contour of the characters as well in order to make it seem a little bit more like he's in movement, he's in middle of motion and also we're going to have this sword up here I guess and having this angle creates a nice sense of him dropping his sword and I'm going to draw a sort of one of these almost I guess not a viking sword but a more of an angle Saxon sword so it's very much based on the Roman Gladius sword but a few hundred years of anglification I don't know if that's a word Saxonification a few hundred years of denim and leather now that's the wrong section okay so here are the flames we're going to go in on the flames and we use a lot of white ink but we need the basic shapes down and for instance for the tip of the sword and we can just leave the sword white as this for the tip of it for I'm going to use white ink so that I can allow the flames to sort of obscure parts of obscure part of the blade the rest is just going to be a white silhouette and all this area is black yes again since I know I'm going to go in with white I don't need to worry all that much about all the details but you know it's not like when you're working with a pencil and an eraser or if you're working digitally and it just can do the undo button there are even though I can paint over with the white ink the it's a lot more limited in my options I can paint over like a couple of times or wipe or scratch off the paint and do it again but it becomes more and more cumbersome the bigger areas you have to cover or the more times you have to fix something it becomes harder and harder much faster than with for instance with pencil and much faster than with the undo button where you don't really have to ever quit undoing and that's one of the strengths of digital painting is that you can do the undo button endlessly and that is one of the weaknesses as well because you're going to quickly press the undo button on a mistake that if you had just followed the mistake for like five more minutes it might have turned into an accidental strength of the drawing a happy mistake a happy accident so it's a lot harder to go all Bob Ross and have happy accidents when you have an undo button and of course it's not like most accidents in art necessarily are happy accidents so there's definitely some drawbacks to doing art like this as well but you know it's give and take it's always give and take everything is now when i'm working like this what i'm doing is i'm sort of penciling in my mind's eye so i envision the shape of him down here and i try to see what i need to draw in order for that shape to be it doesn't need to be completely there but it needs to be close enough and i'll probably show this much clearer when we get to the sorcerer again because this guy he is in the flame so i'm going to actually do more flames in white up and obscuring him i just want some hints of hints of the hints of the figure behind the flames so like this when i look at this hand i start penciling it in my mind's eye i see that up here i need to draw a little bit of the red away and i need to make a the the joint here and how the robe drapes and yeah i'm sort of starting to pencil it in my mind's eye but part of the fun is that if i go in here and i mess up in any sort of way or if i thought wrong and i have to instead of erase and start anew i have to figure out how to live with the consequences especially when drawing something like a hand which is not the easiest thing to draw i don't know if you've heard this is kind of small compared to the paper and compared to the size of my brush so there's it's going to be sort of rough but it needs to have it's that character it needs to sell if this guy appeared just because i see sort of how these dots here can be interpreted as light flickering or not flickering light bouncing off a beard but will not give him a mustache i think here i actually noticed that you know he's supposed to be lighted from here so i made a mess when i put in the dark of the eyes but i can fix that i can fix that that's sort of all i'm doing is this back and forth between small mistakes and small fixes and then trying again the flames here i'm not satisfied with the shapes of the flames at this point not at all in fact there's a lot of things that i'm not satisfied with on this drawing thus far but i have to have faith in the process at least for a while and there's a lot of these pieces that i'm like 90 sure that i will end up destroying and then suddenly they come together and there's a lot of pieces that i just do a couple of lines of work on and then i'm sure that nope nope this is not going to work this is not it i need to do this again and it's mostly based on this gut feeling like this is a knife dagger oh it's a knife it's a knife a little bit magical looking i don't know why these shapes are magical looking they are missed this up maybe i can fix that maybe yeah i don't really need the character to go all the way down here sorry about my squeaky chair if you can hear that i'm going to have ink all the way to the top of the page now when i was drawing comics for a little while i got into the habit of just to save time wherever i knew i would have a big field of black i would just put x's in and then i would when i scanned the work i would fill it in digitally but i actually stopped doing that because because even though it saved time it felt a lot less less satisfying having a good-looking original even even when you're not going to do anything with the original is a boon it just feels a lot better when you can look you can hold the piece of paper in your hands and say yeah this is this is a good-looking this is a good-looking object and i didn't think that was important to me until i started paying more and more attention to it and i started noticing how good it felt that's also one of the things i really missed when when working digitally is you don't have the originals and a print or a screenshot it's sort of lacks that magic because looking at the piece of paper is in a very different way a reminder of everything that happened in the process because you can see you can see the small brush strokes and the errors and you can see where it's been touched up with white ink and yeah so it feels different it feels better i'd say now once i get all this black in i'll also be in a lot better position to take a step back and judge how the drawing is going you know i i see a few things i see there's some wonkiness here and i see that there's some problems there and there's always a lot of things that you can fix and this is this is probably bad advice for beginners but once you get to a certain level of skill where you are comfortable with a lot of your mistakes i found that i can actually quite often leave more of the mistakes in the art than what i really feel comfortable with i can i can be deliberately sloppy in places and those places might even become the favorites of some of my audience i've had many occasions where people have pointed out something that i was this close to deleting because i didn't like it or even an art piece that i was this close to tossing out and saying yeah yeah that one is my favorite because that that really speaks to me and as an artist you are not quite you're not always in control over how the art speaks to someone now what you are in control over is or you should be in control over is what the art says so if if i had for instance drawn this guy and i messed up his face and you couldn't quite see if he was a warlock or a panda that would be a problem but if it's a matter of the the the or if you i drew his face and you couldn't quite see if he's happy or sad or what what is facial what is what his facial face is now what is what his mood is i can't remember the word i'm looking for but if you can't read what's happening in the art then that's the problem anything else wants the readability is once the reader the viewer can read and understand what's going on in the art then anything else is just a matter of style and a matter of taste and in a lot of instances i've actually ended up covering the mistakes of a piece so far that it has in the end ended up in the end ended up damaging the readability of the piece not you know not really the readability but the mood of the piece so i tried to lessy try to create a scary wizard warlock thing here and then i polish it too much and then it loses some of the the scariness of it the darkness of it because it becomes too clean and too correct and too dead in a sense that's the problem of overlay polishing your art is that it ends up in a sense dead okay so we'll start trying to get some more magical shapes into these flames because these are not natural flames they are magic hellfire flames i want them to look sort of like they are grabbing the sword and they're grabbing the character and this will all be slightly concealed when i do the white ink spatters or the white acrylic spatters on top so i can make it a little bit too clear here and this is sort of almost like a hand coming up here it's grabbing him now this fluid acrylic is a little bit thick so if i'm going to do ink spatters then i either need to water it down or use acrylic ink which is uh not quite as thick to sort of make it so it seems like the like his chainmail is reflecting the flames somewhat and yeah there is a sort of mistake here in that the darkness the most of the darkness is down here well it should be up here but i in order to make the character easily readable i either had to mess with the lighting a little bit or or make a i could have made a like a dark silhouette that's just highlighted on one side but that would have been maybe i should have done that i don't shoulda coulda woulda so if if i really should have made this side more of a silhouette that the important thing is sort of that i actually thought about that before and i made a deliberate choice that no i would solve it like this instead give him one finger back now if i was trying to draw unmagical fire then i would be a lot less deliberate with these lines yeah i really want them to sort of feel like arms coming up and grabbing him like it has a life of its own maybe a little bit too much there maybe on this side i'll do it a little bit more loose like this okay i need to water down the liquid acrylic tiny bit just add a couple of drops of water oh actually before i water it down i think i want to do some ink spatter not a lot this image will not have a lot of dark ink spatter i want to do some of it it's a little bit more life and then i'm going to do quite a lot of white ink spatter with the water first a few just a bit of i'm i guess these are glowing embers and then over these these arms of fire i'm going to try to make some more some embers that are going in the direction of the arms i think i need a little bit more water excellent especially down here i want to have quite a lot so it sort of almost consumes the character and then correcting a few small things why did i give him the extra finger maybe i'll destroy that extra finger seemed like a good idea at the time we'll see a little bit more white ink white acrylic yeah i'll actually i think this is good actually i thought i'd go in and fix a little bit on the arm yeah actually i am now i'm looking through the camera screen and yeah i really need to fix that at hand and it's good to have some sort of way to look at your art from a little bit of distance whether you're doing actual distancing yourself from the art or you're using a camera or using tricks such as a mirror which is excellent for looking at the art with fresh eyes but the instant i saw it in the camera i saw that oh it's it's massive i knew it was big but it's massive one of the dangers of working like this is often when you're going back and forth correcting your work it will slowly grow bigger and bigger and things get overblown i think that you know i don't necessarily need to do a lot more on this i can do some red on the dagger and some slight red inks better and i think that's it okay so that was drawing a illustration for outcast silver raiders from start to finish um there's at the time of posting this video there's still a couple of days left of the outcast silver raiders kickstarter so if you like this art and you want a rpg with it then do support us the kickstarter has gone beyond all expectations we're at over 400 funded at the time of this recording and it's been just amazing but you know if you want then do do do support more this piece of art in a year or two will be released for free use because i retain the copyrights to the outcast silver raiders art and i'm allowed to release it for free use later as i do with all my art all my own art is made available for free use so please do check uh out outcast silver raiders and if you like free art check out my patreon if you have the money to support with one dollar a month and that helps more than you can ever and um yeah thank you so much for watching here's a little sneak peek of how the art looks when it's scanned and digitized and if you want a much quicker look at how i make my daily ink monsters check out the video above bye bye