Kristen Maslanka's Fantastic Realities

Honestly, there's nothing like sitting back with your sketchbook and just playing around with doodles and fun designs. It's a great opportunity to work on aspects I can improve *coughhandscough* and on new materials or methods! 

We've all had those moments: You have an idea, a great idea but it's not yet visceral. Maybe it's an emotion or a vague image, but the more you try to find it the more you come up with new ideas and none of them end up on the page because you're not sure which to start with! While that a great start, it's not very helpful for solidifying a concept. When I run into issues like that I just sketch. Messy or no, I get it onto the page and see what I can. I explore the character through the drawing and compare it to that hint of an idea I started with. Ironically I learned this through storyboarding- you won't know if a camera angle will or won't work until you sketch it out and see it. The same applies for me for character design. In this case, I have a character who is insane. I know that I want her to have a poor relationship with technology, but I'm not certain if I want her to have embraced her enslavement by it, or completely left it behind and ...

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. 

Inktober 4: #underwater #young survivor It happened on a tuesday. Raleigh tugged her helmet on snug, smoothing out the wrinkles where the suit bunched against her small frame. " It'll be amazing." He assured her, the bars of the helmet nearly blocking any clear vision of him. Or perhaps that was the excitement brimming. She'd wanted to go underwater since she was a child, and when her  father built her her own little suit, well, she had just about lost all semblance of control. It made it seem almost surreal, standing here in this heavy thing. It was nothing short of uncomfortable to be sure, but it was going to be the best day of her life. The process of lowering her into the water went painfully slow, her father peering over the boat to be sure everything went JUST right. He wouldn't let anyone else watch over the oxygen tanks she was hooked up to by a long strange pipe, nor would he let anyone else go near her. She wasn't worried either way. Though, in hi...