InkTober Day 9 - Sun

Well, that didn't go well.

The prompt for #inktober day 9 was "sun." I thought it would be fun to draw a mandala of a star with ten points. One can draw a ten pointed star by drawing two pentagrams. I remember that drawing stars was easy.

To make the image crisp, I pulled out my straight edge to draw a pentagram. After struggling for about an hour I realized that one cannot draw a star with a straight edge alone. Euclid's method involves protractors.

Having wasted all of my drawing time on a stupid geometry problem, I decided to draw the pentagrams manually.

My idea was to quickly drop a layer of prismacolor. PrismaColor is a wax crayon. In the past I discovered that I could cleaner and thinner lines on wax. Since I was frustrated with my attempt at a geometric drawing, I ended up being really unhappy with the underlayer that I created free hand:

Best of all, I found that I could scrape the ink off the layer of wax when I made a mistake.

Unfortunately, it was after midnight when I sat down to layer in the ink.

I just wanted to go to bed.

I thought my Mandala would look okay if I just did some zentangles in the irregularly shaped points of the star.

I was wrong.

Unfortunately, I did not have a Plan B.

I was using a dip pen that my father had back in college. I was not allowed to play with this as a kid but I always wanted to try them. While I can get nice lines with the pen when I am careful, I found that it is easy for the pens to just discharge ink when I am careless.

Being tired, i was careless.

I could correct the mistakes by waiting for the ink to dry and to scrap the paper.

It was approaching two AM and I just wanted to finish the stupid pictures.

I was unhappy with this image at each step. Here is the ink layer:

Feeling really discouraged, I asked Night Cafe to generate an image of a sun setting over the mountains which I show below.

I've been posting AI images for InkTober on SteemIt.

I thought about dropping this post last night. But I was too tired.

During the night I decided to add a background to the image. I thought about just adding some dark waves behind the star. But as I started drawing, I decide that I should have the background radiate from the image.

That was another mistake.

I finally completed the image shown at the top of the page.

The large number of mistakes I made on this image proves that I created the image with a human brain. #POB

Oddly, the actual drawing looks better than the photographic images. I asked Night Cafe to clean up the image and got this:

To end my frustrating exercise, I asked Night Cafe to generate a mandala.