The Urban Monk

Second assignment: Make a black-white pen illustration that ties together four randomly generated terms. Mine were: ecru (the color of unbleached silk), ahimsa (the vow not to kill living things), chaffer (to haggle), and aglet (the plastic protective casing around the end of your shoelace).

In the end I decided to tie these together by making the piece about an urban monk finding peace within the destructive, materialistic city. BONUS GAME: GUESS WHERE EACH TERM IS

Spoiler, if you were too lazy or I didn't make them obvious enough: The monk is wearing an unbleached silk robe :D, there are aglets on the ends of the strands(?) of his silk robe hoodie ('cause he's an urban monk…. GET IT??? Just look at his head tat, can't get more urban than that), the mouths behind him are chaffering but he is oblivious to it, and he refuses to even harm the bugs (which are also silkworms btw) invading his personal space. Also flowers.

BTW THIS ASSIGNMENT GAVE ME A REALLY FUDGEBUGGING HARD TIME. I had only used pen once before, at which I terribly failed, and during the process of inking this (I did a pencil draft first because I wasn't confident, so I basically had to draw the piece twice), I ran out of at least 8 pens. They were all those really old decrepit pens too, the ones that your parents leave uncovered  in the back of drawers so by the time you take them out the ink is all dry, if there's any left at all. My hand muscles were spasming by the end of this.

Hand twitching aside, I was pretty happy with the final result. I'm kind of proud that I managed not only to tie the terms together, but to also actually have an idea behind the piece so that it could technically stand alone as an actual thing rather than just an assignment to put random words together. Obviously some technical things would be the fact that the outlines of the plants in front are way thicker than the ones behind them ('cause I used marker for those and then crappy incompetent half-dead pens for the rest), that can be easily fixed if I go back and thicken some of the background vegetation with my newly bought wonderful faber-castell pens.