Skulls

This was a school project from my first year at university.

A4 Side Skull, Pencil & Ink

This drawing was made with a 2B pencil and a ruler. The way i create these images is by tracing an original drawing that i've made using a lightboard. The original which can be seen underneath. To create the depth in the skull i apply hard, light pressure on the areas with shadows as well as around the skull. It's actually a quite tedious process, because i had to make every individual line. I completed it after 8 hours in one sitting.

This is the original drawing that i used for both pictures. I used a reference to draw the skull. The traced drawing will turn out different based on how i draw. All of these pictures are A4 in size. Thats why i was drawing with longer and shallow strokes. Instead of crosshatching a lot which is what i usually do.

This one was made with a fountain pen and ink. Instead of using a ruler to keep everything aligned, i made a few light lines to follow. This one was quite a struggle because i had to try and draw as straight as possible. This one took about 12 hours i think, because i had to reapply ink and required a lot more concious effort on my part. If you notice closely you can see the point where i've had too much coffee because the lines starting getting incosistent.

A2 Back of Skull, Pencil

This was an experiment to see what effect diagonal strokes, high density and high pressure would have on a drawing. I made a mistake here of not using the front of a skull, because the figure isn't recogniseable. Though in the context with the other pictures it makes sense.

Heres a picture from the process showing how it's done.

A2 Skull, Pencil

This was the final image that i was starting to work on. I wanted to do a much larger image to achieve a sort of "grandness". Here you can see the light sketch before it was being processed.

This is after i've rendered the picture. I used a much thicker pencil than last time. It took roughly 2 hours including the sketching process.

Heres a picture from the process. It looks pretty cool close up.

Heres the complete version. I took about 16+ hours, which i did in one sitting because i wanted to wrap things up before the presentation. I've never felt so mentally exhausted before.


Final Note

Heres me on the light board, the photo is by Britta Lya. I want to thank her for providing mental support during the process. I don't know what i would do without her. I think as an end statement about this project is that i'll never do work this kind tedious ever again. The results were pretty satisfying though.

Here are some smaller experiments from the project that i didn't feel like writing about:

 T-shirt Designs

I also made some t-shirt designs using my drawings. You can check out my store at Skreened. I've personally bought three shirts from the site. The quality is pretty decent and the print still hasn't worn off. The sizes are slightly bigger than what you would be used to in Norway.