aorta+

This is the first physical sketchbook I've completed, start-to-end, since 2020! The book itself is a Moleskine Art Collection sketchbook, which isn't usually my first choice, but it holds ink and paint well and it's easy to carry around. For the media inside, I used a Pilot light blue mechanical pencil for all of the sketches, and painted over them with watercolour, gouache, and india ink, for the most part (although I did start travelling during the second half of the book and switched to a fountain pen instead.) It also has a couple of my shopping lists and several swatches for new products that I was trying out at the time.

As for content, I was really focusing on developing two specific characters, who appear frequently throughout the book. Some of my old regulars do drop in near the end, though. There's some thumbnailing work, a few Pinterest-fashion-inspired pages, lots of testing out physical colour palettes, and tons (tons.) of monstera leaves. Below are a couple of warnings for pages with potentially sensitive content on them - please read these - and below those are the pages themselves. You can click to expand those. Enjoy!

content warnings

Page 100: light blood/gore on an infant character; religious-inspired imagery. Page depicts a baby (Jesus?) wearing a bloodied blindfold.

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