If you have been reading my blog or checking my instagram for the last month or so you will have seen me taking part in Jake Parker's 'Inktober', where you basically ink a new piece every day. This was my second year taking part, and my first year where I did take part every single day. It was tough but also eye opening and developed my inking skills massively (I basically had none before I started it), to the point where I've now decided to start inking more of my work traditionally.

Just before Inktober I also started my own little challenge called the 'Monster Marathon', I wanted to improve my skills as a monster/creature designer so I decided I should draw a new monster every day. Although I haven't been posting them on social networks, I have still been keeping up with it most days and it's definitely worth while.

What I've discovered though, is that I'd just draw a character and that would be the end of it, but why not push it further to see where it leads? What I've started doing (and what I'd recommend you guys do) is to develop a full page of the same character but switching things round every time. It usually consists of simply changing the composition or size so maybe the eye is really big and high up on one character but really small and below the mouth on another. I've recently finished these lizard heads below as an example.

As a character designer it's important to push a single character as much as possible, even if you do stick with your first idea. So I'll be doing this more and posting the results on a weekly basis.

I really like how these turned out, because although they're all slightly different they still look like they're part of the same species!

If anyone does decide to give this a go, feel free to tweet me the results, I'd love to see them!

DON'T STOP EXPERIMENTING