Today's #inktober prompt was "Crawl" and I thought and thought. In honor of Halloween, I considered creepy crawly vermin, but I thought maybe I wasn't that excited to spend the time studying roaches or spiders or centipedes today, enough to do justice to the subject. I considered army dudes crawling through obstacle course mud puddles, and probably would have gone exactly that way if I had found a photo reference I liked. While I was looking, I came across a photo of a guy swimming though, and I thought "crawl stroke! aha!" and then off to the races went I:

I tried to vary the intensity of the blue to indicate the water fading into the background, and to layer the water over his body to show him actually in the water.

I'm just noticing now that I forgot to fill in the shadow within his mouth - I'll fix that in a revision, easy enough.

I tried to soften the intensity of the contour lines by darkening the shading along them, but only with limited luck. I think I am gonna have to go in and actually erase those in future drawings. Especially when I use colored pencils, those contour lines stick out real strong, and it can be distracting.

There's an oddness in the angle of his chest and I wasn't able to figure out what went wrong there. Would be much obliged to anyone who could offer advice on that front.

So, as always, plenty of room for improvement.

Meanwhile, today is October 31, the final day of Inktober 2020, so probably this is the last drawing from the Inktober prompts until 10/2021, unless I get a cool idea related to one of the few that I skipped. Next I will, I think, do some hand studies, since I have been having trouble with hands.

Thanks for dropping by!