The wonderful World of Fan Art
Making fan art has been a wonderful way to work on honing skills, and attempting new techniques. Remember, I am an inker, and colourist, NOT an illustrator, so I have to first thank all of the illustrators out there that make the real magic happen with the wilds of their pencil sketches.
Fan art has been a great way to express whatever sentiment I am feeling in the moment, and stay pop culturally relaveant with the day to day happenings of television, movies, and upcoming comics. Each of the pieces you see above was pencilled by a different artist (all credited in the original posts on instagram.) (Click Here for more info.) and then inked, coloured and rendered by Allison Danger to create what you see above. I love bold and bright colours, and so most of my practice involves characters I can play with in a multi-technicolour universe. I have, in spite of myself, tried to move to more monochromatic characters to test my own limits, and came up with the Hellboy (above), so maybe monochrome characters deserve more or my attention.
With portability and clean up being non existent, I have moved to almost exclusively using the iPad and Apple Pencil as my weapons of choice in creating. There is still something pretty magical about using a grizzled old paint brush and a tiny pot of black ink that will always have a small piece of my heart. When moving from physical to digital, I was hesitant about how intuitive and sensitive the pressure sensors would be to get that perfect point on the end of an inked line. Apple didn't disappoint, and the apps available are top tier as well. I fell in love with ProCreate (for those that use this app, you can tell from the images above surrounded interface). The ease of this program is user friendly enough that my daughter was able to pick it up, and with little to no coaching, make a multi layer piece.