Sketching everyday moments to inspire art & comics

Greetings. This blog post ended up in my drafts for a couple months and I never got around to actually writing it… until now!

During the autumn my grandparent’s apple trees were laden with small apples. They’re trees I’m particularly familiar with, though my days of climbing up them are a bit behind me now. The trees are on the smaller end, and aren’t really supportive to adult-sized climbing shenanigans. Picking them isn’t quite as adventurous!

Fallen apples among fallen rose petals, in various states of decay.

Inspiration from decay

Instead of climbing up the trees, I sketched what fell off them. Nestled amongst the grass and fallen rose petals were a gathering of apples in various stages of ripeness and decay. At the times I had been thumbnailing a couple comic pages for a particular scene heavily relying on apples. Seeing the apples in all their forms helped give me a boost of inspiration in what to do with the thumbnails.

Some apples were bright and firm while others were bruised and caving in, and many were at a point in-between. That sequence of decay was something I wanted to document in sketches, as I felt it was not only interesting but would aid me in my storytelling.

The apple studies in my sketchbook, drawn in HB and 2B mechanical pencil.

Sometimes what grabs our interest or sparks inspiration can come in simple everyday moments. Like picking apples in your grandparent’s garden. Taking the time to notice these things and record them down is something that I value more and more each time I do it. Even if it doesn’t immediately bear fruit (sorry, I had to find a pun somewhere) like this did, I often get inspired by flipping through old sketchbooks later on.

The sequence of decay is now something I’ve incorporated into the thumbnails for a comic page. A page that I’ll be using to test another method of traditionally painting panels. I even got a two for one deal by having both the inspiration, and experience of drawing the sequence. Yaay!