I've been sketching this image without any definite plan, just going with the flow up until now but I had decided I wanted the image to use chiaroscuro - the dramatic use of light and dark to create the perception of solid form, so the darkness of the black pen seemed ideal. You can see as well that I've been playing with the idea of something being inside the skull's open mouth; I often make notes on my drawings so that I can remember the ideas I've had.
I'll need to fill in the background to create the sense of darkness to offset the light hitting the head. And there's a lot of background! If I use anything other than the same pen I think it will look odd so I'll have to persevere. I could add some faint detail to break the background up but I think I'm going to keep it simple.
The texture of the horns has to look different from the texture of the skull, so I make different marks with the pen, more scoring than gentle shading, although when I have built up the detail I do go over the whole horn lightly with the pen to reinforce the form with shading.
Most of the detail is built up with hatching and cross-hatching pen lines, often then blended to hide those lines but at this stage the hatching lines are clearly visible. I'm also laying a sheet of paper over the sketch, only revealing the section I'm working on so that I don't smudge the pen's ink and ruin all that work!
The form is really starting to come out from the paper now. I may make the shadows darker, I'm not sure yet. My plan now is to complete the detail over all the paper and then see how the shading values play out together before I start darkening any of the drawing I've already done.
So I'm going to complete the other side of the head and the other horn and then I will fill in the detail in the mouth. I'm doing it in this order because I'm still not sure about what will go inside the mouth so it'll give me a little more time to decide. There's so much more to do but it'll have to wait til another day!
