Dr. Hannibal Lector

Truthfully, I don’t have much to say personally about this opening piece. While the other Inktober pieces will have personal stories attached to them, this opening piece is a bit of a standalone. My fiancé and I had literally just finished watching the film the night before so it was still fresh in my mind when Inktober started. That being said, choosing to draw Dr. Hannibal Lector over the other characters in the film was a no brainer.

Hannibal Lector is a psychopath. He is a villain by all standards and deserves to be locked up, and yet his psychologist background, his fatherly mentoring of Clarice Starling, his genius propels him into the good graces of the audience. You find yourself rooting for him at certain points in the film rather than being frightened that a psychopathic cannibal has just escaped custody. It’s this malevolent charm and class that Sir Anthony Hopkins brings to the role that sucks the audience in and leaves them hanging onto a disconnected phone like Clarice at the end of the film, and I think that’s why I chose to draw him over Clarice or Buffalo Bill. It’s because Hannibal Lector is undoubtedly the star of the film.

Looking back now, I had no fear of what was going to happen while creating this piece. I simply got my brush, Bristol and ink and dove straight into it. Using only a photo reference from the Internet, I tackled my insecurity of realism and created something I’m proud of, and I learned things along the way. Using a relatively small brush, I learned to let the ink do the detailing. The brush was thick enough to create the illusion of detail without needing to solidly define it, but when I wanted to really define details I used the brush pen to create sharp lines for wrinkles and crosshatching. For highlights, I chose simple white acrylic on the areas that were hit hard by light in the photo reference. I also wouldn’t go over highlighted areas with the ink wash to create the illusion of lighting contrast for the piece.

These techniques, while improvised at the time, became the foundation on which I completed each Inktober piece.

Overall, I was very happy on how this piece turned out. In only about an hour and a half, I had gotten out of my comfort zone and hit the ground running into Inktober 2020.