Project Description

INKTOBER 52 2023 Day #26: CLIMB.

“Despite the fact that I love to climb things (rocks, trees…the occasional university building…), I had a hard time deciding what to draw for this prompt. I really wanted to avoid the obvious and literal of just having PMD climb something. I briefly toyed with the idea of doing something ‘King Kong’ related, but I just don’t have a strong connection to that (and I didn’t feel like drawing a bunch of windows on a building). I suppose, in hindsight, it would have been really fun to have had PMD climbing inside one of the buildings at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, since that’s where I went to college and spent some down time with my best friend Jorj trying to climb from the first floor to the third floor without using the stairs or elevators in a couple of buildings (it’s probably a small miracle neither of us is dead or paralyzed). In my quest for an idea, I stumbled upon that phrase ‘don’t climb a tree to look for fish’, which stuck in my Brain. It’s somewhat poignant, I suppose, but also fairly amusing to visualize. Of course, if it was Plunger Monkey looking, he’d be looking for the Multi-Purpose Novelty Squid, and he’d definitely find him in a tree.

I debated how to handle the foliage in the background. I have to fight not to draw every little detail sometimes. Doing so distracts the eye and pulls focus away from where I want it, and it’s just not how vision works. I actually inked the whole piece, then took a night to sleep on it before deciding how to handle the background. After some digital experimentation, I finally settled on this layering of hatched fields. I’m not sure if it works, but it’s something to explore. There’s also probably 32 pounds of ink on this page.”