It’s day two of Inktober! I’m still putting in long hours on a book project, so didn’t have much time to do today’s offering—but it turned out all right, I thought! The colour scheme is developing nicely; I want to keep this to a limited palette as I did the last challenge book, but a little less limited. So far I’ve got brown, blue, and yellow ochre. I may add some red.

Today’s and yesterday’s, side by side as they are in my book:

I’m using a Moleskine Japanese Album, which has accordion style pages. The ink is Pigma Micron pen .03, with Col-erase pencils.

I was fascinated by the articles about loud animals that I looked up to research this. My first thought was to do howler monkeys, but then I saw that the loudest animals are undersea! And it seems noise is a subjective experience, as this article from the BBC about the sperm whale and other noisy undersea neighbours attests.

I was particularly taken with a near runner-up, the pistol shrimp. This tiny creature, 3-5 centimetres long, packs a 218 decibel punch with the snap of a claw—also generating a bubble of heat that can reach 4700 degrees centigrade for a tiny fraction of a second! It’s a pretty little thing, and very tempting to draw. However, that was just too many legs to draw in the short time I had today. Such is the stuff of artistic decisions!