 do you get from this type of random ink plot to a finished monster? That's what we're going to be looking at today and I'm going to in real time show you two different approaches to drawing ink monsters because one of the most common questions I get is do I know what I'm going to draw when I make the random ink plot or is it truly random and the answer is it is random but you can also choose for it to not be as random and I'm going to show both of these approaches my name is Kim Diaz Holm I'm also called an ungehad Holm I've been doing these daily ink monsters for three years or so now more than three years and I'm doing it as a way of of spicing up my life with a little bit of the daily creativity no matter if I have good days or bad days I always have time to do one ink monster and I'm diagnosed bipolar so some days are good and some days are truly bad and that little dose of creativity is very essential for me for getting a more balanced life now the reason why I have this ink plot laying around is because I made it someday and I didn't like it so I didn't even start drawing anything on it and that's one of the most important things to remember is that these ink plots are not precious and a lot of artists you know struggle with thinking their art is precious in a part of the process where it's really not especially at the beginning of an art project you can draw a couple of lines and just if you don't like it you can toss it away and that might be better it's art isn't precious and you know when you start closing in on having done a finished piece then it starts becoming more precious and then you get into that you know don't mess up mode and that extra adrenaline might help you you know finish a painting or a drawing better than it would if you hadn't had that spike of adrenaline but you shouldn't have that at the beginning of the process because you can't sustain it quite long enough well here are a couple of more of the different ink monsters that I've started and just abandoned because I didn't like it I didn't like it I don't know what I've done here I've drawn something I don't remember this I started something I don't like it and here are a couple of examples of ink monsters I've done that I've liked this one I did on a live and it was a lot of pressure so a lot of adrenaline it was sort of precious from the beginning because of doing it on a live while this one here I was having a bad day so I chose to do a very simple puglifant I love this puglifant another one one I Ian like him as well he's a bit wonky and that's probably how I felt that they that day either because of the lack of time or because of lack of creative energy so doing something very easy very simple with the ink monsters is perfect for those days let's start so we're going to do two ink monsters one where I show you what happens when my reigns are free and I can do whatever I want now let's see if we can get some ink here oh I'm only almost run out of ink I have run out of ink let's do it like this instead oh there is the ink now for this first ink monster I'm going to just dab it like this and not decide not have any idea of what I'm going to draw and for the second one I'm going to do the same but I'm going to decide beforehand that it's going to be a troll and I'll get into the reason why later so when I stare at the inklots to try to decide what it is I can do a lot of different things so for instance I see two teeth here in a little eye so I could make a monster face there that could be here up here here are some interesting shapes so if I was going to do a troll this would be like the troll nose here is I but it looks it looks a little bit wrong so I don't like it quite and there's probably countless other things I could see here like here is the nose of a bear and the eye I could probably the longer I stare at it the more options I could see but I usually don't stare at it more than a couple of seconds like 10 seconds 20 30 seconds because I want to do it quick I want to do it impulsively and as I said it's not precious at this point so if I felt like doing something complicated I could start drawing the bear face here and make a where bear or make a some sort of bear like hug like some sort of creature or I could you know use this to make the beginning of a face we could have nose down here or any diff any number of different complicated options but days where I'm feeling exhausted or don't have a lot of time I often just start by placing a couple of eyes somewhere here let's do an eye that's an eye and then we actually have an eye there and it's a bit of a wonky eye so he'll get a wonky eye here as well and then you already have something and this one will be very cartoony so we're using the pattern here as a shadow to shape the top of the head this one is going to look a little bit like Soydberg I'm noticing from Futurama so maybe just go with that go with some tentacles and since he is backlit apparently the tentacles should be backlit as well so we're drawing the tentacles first and then after we've drawn a couple of tentacles like those always make sure the sum of the tentacles go behind the others so after these tentacles we outline them then you don't outline both sides on all the tentacles on one side you outline you so there's a little bit of light from this direction a little bit of light from that direction so you try to outline it like that it is kind of fun to guess where you know when the random ink plot is deciding where the light is then it's kind of fun to guess how the shadows what the shadows are describing it's which shapes the shadows are describing and how they dictate the shadows for the rest of the thing I'm above like this it's not very handsome so yeah looks a little bit like Soydberg little bit like Thulu and we're going to we're going to do him like Thulu so we're going to give him some little wings membranous wings to to fly through the cosmos and then a little arm and I want to keep this very cartoony so I'm not going to do a huge amount of detail here but we're going to keep the shadows going to yeah we're giving him a little weird body I thought first that I should do him sick sitting like the best relief drawn in or described in Lovecraft's story called Cthulu but then I saw this little butt here and I thought oh maybe we can give him this sort of pear shaped body and that would be fun and two very tiny legs this is looking silly and when I talked about not being precious I'm noticing that right now I'm starting to get a little bit precious because I like some aspects of him I like the eyes but I also dislike some parts so then I have to make a choice will I get precious and finish to the drawing or should I just toss it away I'm very close to tossing it away but I think I will see this one through even though it could be better it could it could always be better okay now this isn't the because of because of the body this isn't the easiest ink monster I could draw I'm doing things a little bit complicated for myself but it's still reasonably easy and cartoony and silly and we need the other arm that arm needs a hand we're going to do that like this and he's going to hold a finger up the lighting on both sides a little bit of lighting here doesn't have to be very realistic but yeah yeah starting to come together a little bit messy in here could probably probably go over with some white ink as well but I think I'm going to leave it as this just try to create some softer shadows with a dry brush yeah and then some stupid legs stupid legs is always the best and I will call him cute to loo because he's cute have I called a monster cute to loo before I probably I can't remember it sounds very obvious so this is number 12 13 and it's cute to loo it reminds me of the call of the cute cutie mark episode of my little pony cute to loo like this and for good measure I always do some a little bit of shadow underneath and also if you ink plots ink spatters because that looks good now you have him cute to loo cute to loo I don't know how you pronounce it now oh every time after I sign it I always notice some like tiny detail I have to fix here and there always some tiny detail okay better better almost good yeah I like him I like him let's do number 1214 and let's do a little notice here and we're going to write I'm a gonna draw I'm gonna I'm gonna draw a troll a troll very professional okay so again we're going to do the inks better almost running out of ink and I'm going to close my eyes while I do this just to not influence it too much because you can't suddenly influence the shape of the ink plot when you've done it a lot of times but the thing that happens now that we know that this is a troll is that our options are we still have a lot of options but the options are more limited so I could say that this is a part of a nose and have the troll like that or I could like that is the nose and I'm going to draw a troll that is kind of a Norwegian style troll so it's going to be based on Kittlesons and Eric Vagentscholl's trolls it's going to be those big-nosed ugly fantastic Norwegian trolls but I could also go on this side and say that okay this is an eye and here is a long nose that way or like here starts the nose or it could be looking at us and here is the nose but I think sort of the best troll shape I'm seeing now is the one with the nose down here so we're going to try for that one and when I try this I'm I don't know how the complete troll will look just yet but I'm starting to see an outline I'm starting to see how the troll might be hunched over and how the head is shaped how the hair will shape itself and right now I said that it will be a Norwegian troll that's very closely based on the troll style of Teodor Kittleson but right now I'm seeing a lot of John Bauer in it and John Bauer is for those who don't know Teodor Kittleson is the artist who defined how Norwegian trolls look and then Teodor Kittleson John Bauer is the artist who defined how Swedish trolls look and I don't know quite where you can see Kittleson's influence today outside of Norway you can see he's been used for album covers for black metal albums and he's still influential but I can't really think of a mainstream fantasy property where you see a lot of his work but John Bauer's work you see a lot of in in Brian Froud's art you see a lot of it in things like the dark crystal and yeah and so this is looking a little bit more Bauer like but it will probably end up Kittleson like interesting thing about about Norwegian trolls is that they had some characteristics in the fairy tales and the folk tales and the sagas and the mythology you know we have Norse mythology where it describes a Jotun the mother or the grandmother of the God Teed describes her as having a hundred heads or a thousand heads I don't remember and you have the word troll is sort of used for any supernatural ominous presence so anything from a from what we consider a troll today to a basilisk to a mermaid to ghostly figures everything can be a troll and then it slowly starts morphing into becoming more and more of of a specific thing a specific sort of malicious but stupid often nature force then in the fairy tales they have sort of almost concretized into these big giant malicious stupid things with some characteristics like a big nose and big eyes and yeah many heads often but if you look at art Norwegian art from of trolls they don't really feature any of those characteristics until the National Romantic Era and until Theodore Kittleson gets his hands on the assignment of drawing the a Norwegian fairytale collection in the 1880s 1890s something like that before that all trolls in art are just did it like round pudgy weird looking humans at least from what I found and I haven't found any sort of source that exhibits the troll like features before Kittleson if I'm not mistaken he got the assignment from his older friend Eric Warenczol and then both him and Warenczol sort of defined how the look for the books were and even other artists such as Otto Cindy took from Kittleson's interpretations of trolls and now if you visit cities like Bergen you will see a lot of these long-nosed trolls around as sculptures and drawings and they're kind of everywhere so I want this troll to be peeping his head out from the woods so we're going to be drawing some trees here just the silhouettes of trees because tree silhouettes are easy to draw and then some tree silhouettes behind here as well so it's a troll peeping out behind the trees and as you probably notice this drawing is taking a little bit longer time than the first drawing and one of the reasons is you know that I chose a more complex thing to draw and the other is you know not everything about the original inkblot will fit a hundred percent to the troll I'm drawing so I had to manipulate it a little bit more than I would with the first piece I didn't really have to manipulate it a lot and that it was a there was a reason why I chose to draw a troll and that's because if I make an inkblot monster and I want to do something more in this not so cartoony style and I want to have it easy for myself I draw a troll or a zombie you can always find a troll or a zombie in these inkblots because that's what we this is sort of a question of of what's it called your ability to spot faces in random shapes or spot patterns in randomness and now I'm blanking on what the name for that ability is but my point is that the easiest thing to see is always faces now it can be like the face of a big cat or of a wolf or of the snake or something like that but but but we're most trained to see human faces in random patterns and since these patterns are random it's most easy to make something that's kind of ugly and twisted but human like so a zombie or a troll is always the easiest I could have said that I'm going to draw a dragon and I would have managed to do that in fact I think that's what I did on the live where I did the dragon that I showed earlier I think I decided first based on a request that a I'm going to do a dragon and then I made the inkblot so that's perfectly possible but it's more complicated now I'm going to this here sort of reminds you of atmospheric haste or some mist or something like that it's also a very easy way of not having to draw details and not having to blend these two into each other so we're making it easy for ourselves and a lot of the tricks I do with these ink monsters is how to make it easy for myself but if you look at this composition right now like with a cutulu it was okay because it was just a cutulu standing there and no problem it looked nice enough but here we have a very this looks more like a finished picture finished drawing and we have a very unbalanced composition and I'll take them I'll extend the white or the black out to the edges here because if it's if I extend the ink to the edges on one side of a drawing I want to do it on the others as well and the reason why I do it on here is because in order to balance the composition I'm going to draw a night sky here behind the clouds and we're going to do like this and we could probably do a couple of stars as well sometimes I leave a little white frame around the ink around the drawing other times I draw it all the way to the edges and that sort of depends on how the composition feels and in this case I thought it felt correct to do it like this and then a little bit of some ink spatter we're almost out of ink now so it's lucky that we're almost finished these small spatters will just help tie the image together because of the messy style that I'm already doing and then we're going to sign and number it it's going to be number 1214 yeah 1214 and we'll just call him old forest troll that's all we need I sometimes I refer to mythology or fair tales sometimes I make up silly names other times I just call it for what it is and it is an old forest troll and now that we've signed it let's see if there's some small things we need to fix and there's always some things you need to fix just extend the shadow here a little bit more so it looks correct like this and also fix a little bit here and then I think we've got it by George we've got it so let's look at both of them and hopefully this was a useful way to understand some of the differences between doing an ink bot monster where you have pre-decided what to draw and one where you just go with the flow and if you're new at drawing ink monsters or doing a similar type of exercise I would recommend to just go with the flow make an ink plot create some eyes on it and make something silly and then as you advance in skills especially if you have studied constructive drawing and comic book drawing and concept design drawing then you can start playing around and and just doing the ink plot as a way to to put a little bit of randomness into the predetermined drawing anyhow if you like what I do and if you like videos 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