This fantastic piece was drawn by third-year illustration student Ernest Brants.
Brants was featured on The Connector for a piece that highlighted his creativity in translating his traditional skills in inking to a digital format. Now, Brants is being featured once more for going further and trying techniques he was hesitant about before.
One statement Brants often loves to repeat is, “I am not a painter.” A lover of dry media, Brants has always strayed away from mediums such as paint to create his illustrations whenever he possibly could. His digital drawing process followed this pattern, where Brants preferred to work with cell-shading and inking to render his pieces, rather than painting digitally to create his finished pieces.
This is not to say that Brants did not admire the painterly way — in fact, he looked up to it immensely. It was for this reason that Brants decided to conquer his fear of being more painterly and experiment a little bit with that rendering style for this piece, which he lovingly calls, “Monke.”
The painterly style is visible in the rendering of the jacket and some of the shading on his character’s face. These large spaces proved to be a bit of a challenge for Brants working in this style, but it is clearly seen that he has conquered it. Still loyal to his pen and ink style, Brants incorporated some of that rendering technique into the text of the piece and some very minuscule parts of the character’s hair and the fish around him. Combining his new technique with his old gave this digital piece an extremely successful multimedia look that Brants is extremely proud to share.
In case you have not seen Brants’s previous article on here and want to see more of his spectacular work, check out his Instagram at @intoxicate.ted.
