I drew this image for a client who needed a vintage looking/pirate-style Octopus Illustration to press onto a T-shirt. She needed a black ink drawing of an octopus stuck inside of an old school whiskey bottle with possible green/blue watercolour splashes added to it.
I’m not sure if I’m qualified to credit this project to the law of attraction but I have been actively dreaming about a project for a while now when I get to experiment with vintage drawing techniques. It made me feel very excited to witness this project proposal being manifested before my eyes.
I started with researching vintage drawings to understand the technique artists used to use. I came across some pretty great images and saw some common features. The biggest realisation I had was that since people used one colour only and one tool only that had a fixed thickness to illustrate everything (different materials, textures, shades and colours), they had to be clever with the technique. And even though every surface was built of the same ‘ingredients’ such as lines and/or dots, the result was a huge variety of textures and depth because of how the artist used these elements. I also had the impression that leaving a certain amount of space empty was just as important as colouring in others.
So I got my isograph pens and tried to mimic this technique of creating surfaces and textures and shadows with lines and dots only. It did take long hours to create this piece but I would never trade a good old drawing session to any computer editing.
art from scratch 