Drawing An Exploding Skull Illustration In Black And White Ink

When drawing a good idea like an exploding skull with just black and white ink pens, the key thing to remember is the structure of the skull first and to what extent you want the skull to be destroyed, it's that simple.

Here follows some progression shots of drawing this concept on A3 size paper. The first rough sketch in pencil I pretty much nailed that moment, just as it's started to explode with the eyeballs popping out of the skull like Olives.

If you are trying to draw this kind of horror art, I would recommend you do some rough sketches beforehand to get the idea right in your head and the placement of the design. For me, I knew early on that the skull had to be directly in the centre of the paper with everything flowing from that source image.

Sketching the rough idea for an exploding skull.

I used a mix of Pigma Microns and uni-pin fine line ink pens to ink the basic outline of the skull design. The inking stage is always the best time to clear up anything which you don't like about the drawing.

I inked the outline of the whole skull design with fine line pens

I used a thick bullet tip Sharpie marker for the black space in between all the white splatters which will represent the blood. I call these types of thick markers disposable, because they don't last long usually when filling in large areas of black in an illustration.

Filling in big spaces on the paper can take longer so stick with it. 

 Once all the black areas were filled in, I used a White Sakura Gelly Roll ink pen to add more white splatters simulating the blood. I quite possibly won't be coloring this illustration in any time soon as I like the contrasting black and white of this piece.

The full drawing finished of an exploding skull