08/28/2026
"Breakfast" Black prismacolor on mixed media paper. I'm sure that for a lot of ancient Egyptians, the early morning was just like many of ours, in some ways. The moon still in the sky. The sun is just beginning to rise. And the cats are just like running in circles around the bed on top of their sleeping bodies like wAKE THE HELL UP WE ARE GOING TO DIE RIGHT NOW IF WE DO NOT GET OUR NILE FISH BITS or whatever.
So a few months back I casually explored Egyptian relief art a little bit out of curiosity and I did a marker scribble one morning to try my hand at sketching it. Well, it came out cool, and two people wanted it, so one person got it, and the other person was added to my list for a replica or something similar.
Now I've done the second one and changed the kitties to look like their cats. I used tracing paper to do it so that it was as similar as possible to the one the second person fell in love with.
I also got to begin training my brain away from a back and forth dragging motion for shading and into rounded movements.
While I was shading all of this, I was watching blackwork tattoo shading tutorials on YouTube. (that's mainly the type of tattoo I'm interested in)
It was interesting how the instructor said "rounded" but that didn't even necessarily mean round, it can actually be quite flat/skinny oval in shape, but the takeaway point was that the pencil/(needle in theory) doesn't stop moving.
The demonstration of right and wrong tattoo shading motions reminded me of what happens when I do the back and forth dragging movement to shade while woodburning with the detail tip. I always get unwanted extra dark marks where the tip switched direction. This might improve my woodburnings too.
I caught myself doing it the old way like a million times and corrected it each time. This was a really good drawing to start applying this to and I'm SO STOKED with how it turned out, I have to scan it. š¤©
