Pet Portraits for InkTober

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m taking advantage of InkTober to practice pet portraiture in a style that’s more time-efficient as well as more fun and challenging in a new way. I’m allowing myself no more than 15 minutes for each portrait, mainly to keep InkTober from becoming burdensome but also as an exercise in speed without sacrificing too much accuracy. Without careful measuring and blocking as I used to do with colored pencil portraits, I sometimes lose proportions, but I’m hoping that will improve over time.

 o far, I am really enjoying the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen alone or with my Sailor Naginata fude de mannen fountain pen (containing Platinum Carbon Black ink). The white Gelly Roll is for tiny highlights only, like the catchlight in the eye, and whiskers. For the cat, I used a light gray Uni Pin brush pen for the shadow that the eyelids cast on the cat’s eyes. It probably wasn’t necessary, but before I put in that shading, the cat didn’t seem to have quite the same attitude. My goal is to capture the animal’s essence more than an exact resemblance.

Another thing I used sparingly was the fude pen to hatch shading or dark fur in some areas. I need to avoid the temptation, though, of drawing in all the fur with the finer pen, which is another reason for my 15-minute time limit!

One of the biggest challenges so far is drawing white or light-colored fur with a black brush pen only (both Oct. 5 and 6). I end up drawing mainly the negative spaces around the light fur. Another challenge will be drawing an all-black animal without ending up with a solid black mass of ink. The first week was a warm-up; I’ll move on to more challenging pets soon!

(All reference photos for InkTober pet portraits were used previously for commissioned portraits in the past couple of years.)