Kristen Maslanka's Fantastic Realities

Inktober 23- Juicy. Remember plucking those juicy peaches right off the tree and trying not to drip everywhere? Inktober 28-- The Fall 

October 20th was Jackal and October 21'st was Demigod, which I thought quite apropos! Firstly, I adore jackals, and secondly, I adore the jackal-headed god Anubis. When I was younger a friend of mine had a birthday at Universal Studios where they had just put in a Mummy walkthrough haunted-house type thing. My friends and I decided to dare to tackle going through it by playing our roleplay characters and making a game of it.  W e were young and thus very easily scared. The 'spookers' jumped out at us and chased us down the hall, lights flickered and screams from people we'd never met echoed down the halls.  However, we had an obsession with dogs and mythology and frequently brought her pups as characters in our roleplaying. Because of that we looked to the Anubis statues to "guide us" we larped our way out of that haunted house, following Anubis as our guide. What would have been a maze, fortunately, wasn't for us because the Anubis statues appare...

                                                       One of the things I love to do is crosshatch. For these, I took inspirations from some of my favorites- Charles Dana Gibson and A.B Frost. For the bottom I believe the theme was "lost time traveler" so I simply couldn't pass up an opporunity to work in Jay Ward Style remnicient of Mr. Peabody and Sherman.

I've had so much fun exploring new inking techniques. I've been digging out my Joseph Clement Coll and Bernie Wrightson books and setting them beside my Heinrich Kley books, pouring over their work. It's marvelous the power of line work. I recall visiting an exhibit at the Getty-- Gustav Klimt and the Magic of Line. Throughout the exhibit they demonstrated examples of his fluid line and I was smitten. What we can do with line is remarkable, so I'd like to bring that to my work as well.