You Know The Name of King Kong

Back in January, we inked Godzilla as a way to celebrate our love of Godzilla Minus One. This month, Godzilla X Kong:The New Empire hits theatres. And while we’re not sure whether we’ll love it or not, Michelle and I thought it was only fair to ink up a King Kong in anticipation of the release.

The difference between the two should be obvious. I inked Godzilla with pens, using hatching to achieve my grey tones. With Kong, I decided to use ink wash. It’s a softer look, but I think it works well for the composition and subject (a giant gorilla stomping through a misty forest on an uncharted island).

In addition to my own ape inks, we have once again conned Michelle into playing a game of “Ink It or Stink It” where she’ll take a run at inking my drawing of Kong’s apparent nemesis, Skar King.

We both learned a little about technique and materials while working on these, which is our constant goal. But if you want to see how they turned out, you can check out the video at the link below:

Inking Godzilla Minus One

I don’t know what you guys did over holiday break, but Michelle and I just kept going back to the theatre to see Godzilla Minus One. We weren’t even necessarily huge Godzilla fans before this movie. I mean, of course he’s a ton of fun. He’s a monster. But this movie? It stomped us flat and left us breathless. Best movie we’ve seen in a long time.

When I was a kid, when I saw a monster movie that got under my skin, I’d spend days lying on the living room rug filling my sketch pad (and any other random piece of paper I could lay my hands on) with drawings of the monster. So it seemed natural for me to do the same thing with this new, powerful, terrifying Godzilla.

Big difference is that now I have better tools at my disposal. So I lightboxed my sketch onto heavy cotton watercolor paper, and went at it with Black Star inks and Micron fineliners.

My plan was to set up three distinct values — lights, mids, darks — and set up the composition so that they frame each other nicely, and lead the viewer’s eye where I want it to go. I wrestled over whether to render this in inkwash or hatching — each have their benefits — but chose to go with a very measured, hatched linework for the midtones to contrast with the chaos of the subject matter.

I had a lot of fun working on this and practicing my brushwork, hatching, and monster doodling. If you want to see me put the whole things together, Michelle and I recorded my process for this week’s video and talked about our Godzilla Minus One experience (no spoilers).

Inking Godzilla

I’ve always preferred human-sized monsters to giant, building-sized monsters, but…whatever. To each his own. I still had fun inking this Godzilla.

Michelle (Run Red Run) and I talked about Godzilla movies, the old Godzilla cartoon, and some other Godzilla-adjacent subjects during this very short process video.

It’s a quick illustration done with the Pilot Shinpitsu Pocket Brush Pen and inkwash. Nothing too elaborate, and it kind of explains itself but, basically, I inked in the basic linework with the Pilot Shinpitsu, then slopped on an ink/water mix with a brush.

If you feel like killing five minutes, here’s the video: