A dude I work with, who is actually good at this sort of thing, recommended making a brush with one soft end, one hard end. Sortof like so:

The big smear at the top there is the actual brush shape. Basically it leaves your strokes with a soft side, and a hard edge, and depending on your stroke-speed and spacing, it sets feinter hard lines and right angles everywhere. So I’ve found it just leaves lots of little accidents everywhere. Blowing up the brush size really big, lightly scattering some hard lines and gradients, then zooming back down and doodling. I’m not great, but it’s felt useful and versatile so far. Made this with it:

It’s mind-crushing to contemplate whether it’s really possible for someone to get much better at something they may just lack natural aptitude for.

We’re all in love with the idea that we can better ourselves, so I’m suspicious of just how true it is. But I’m not sure there’s an alternative really. You kind of just HAVE to be optimistic about this stuff. It’s optimistic naivety or bust.

As much as the other races are subservient, the Chaos Whales are vain and domineering. They’ve been kings of their world for millennia. Then we arrived and shattered their worldview.

Unlike the other marine mammals, the Chaos Whale feeds off the the hydrothermal vents that pock-mark the crust of Europa. They can stay down there for decades. We don’t have submersibles that can withstand the pressure. We have to wait for them to come to us.

Their skin is impregnable and dense. Bullets, harpoons, explosives? Won’t scratch them. Short of poisoning the water or mini-nukes – something we’ve only done twice, at untold cost to the ambient life – there’s only one way to take them down: intravenously.

We wait for the beast’s attack, then rumble the water to disorient it, and I get launched at the dorsal fold. Once I’ve drilled my way in I crawl to the nearest arterial vessel. Their deep, rhythmic pulse only pumps blood once every nine seconds. I get to the heart, deploy my batteries, and then the hard work begins. It takes hours. When I finish, I sleep. I always have such fantastic dreams. I’m still asleep when they cut me out.

People ask if I feel sorry for the aliens I’ve killed. “No,” I reply. “I’m a Heartbreaker. You don’t want your heart to get broken, don’t fall in love.” And then I laugh.

Heartache is hard.

Working on a quicker, scrappier style of slapping ink over these pencils. The pencils themselves I’m just about done, but before I sign off on them I want to know how well they’re acting as a guide for the way I want to go through with ink.