You know that story about how if you leave a monkey alone with a typewriter given infinity he'll eventually bang out Shakespeare? That was me and this drawing. Most people just see a nice sketch, but I know. One in a hundred, one in a thousand maybe, comes out like this. I had no time, no prep, no planning. I grabbed a still from Akira Kurosawa's 'Seven Samurai', blurry, dark, not a lot of info. I only had a couple of hours to draw Friday night, so I wanted to just do a quick ink hatch thing, and I expected to make most of it black.
Then I found the line. I mean I found it. You can see all I was doing was the one angle, trying to match the angle of the rain. But it just started making all sorts of interesting shapes, especially in the areas that were supposed to just be black. I started to see things in it, things I've seen come from Frazetta, Wrightson, Kubert. Now let me be clear, when it comes to line art, those guys? Actually Shakespeare. Me: monkey. Them: Shakespeare.
But I found something. I don't know exactly how to do it again, but I'm going to try to figure it out.
I'm still a monkey, but now I'm a monkey with ambition.