AlphaBooks Week Iby *SamWolk

Traditional Art / Drawings / Illustration / Storybook

Time for another artistic alphabetical foray. I am drawing characters from literary sources every week for AlphaBooks!

For this series I will not be spending days and days laying down ink. These will all be quick and dirty drawings, and most of them will be pencil sketches. Also, instead of 11x14 paper, I'm doing all of these on 5.5x8.5 paper. So all around I'm going to be more loose and fluid with this series.

I begin my submissions with Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, from Herman Melville's classic 1851 tale of revenge and obsession, Moby Dick. The great white sperm whale maimed Ahab off the coast of Japan during a previous whale hunt. He lost a leg in the attack, now replaced by a peg made out of a whale's jawbone. His singular purpose is to hunt down and destroy Moby Dick, and nothing and no one will convince him otherwise.

Ahab met his end in one of the great moments of literary irony: as his harpoon pierced Moby Dick, a loop in the rope caught Ahab around his neck. Moby Dick dragged him down into the cold oblivion of the sea. His obsession became his undoing, and led to the deaths of all his shipmates except for the tale's narrator, Ishmael.

Make sure you check out the other great submissions at the AlphaBooks tumblr.