Well, this week has seen my plans interrupted and delayed considerably so I've only managed to ink about two and a bit panels so today (despite problems with ASDA's home delivery service again cutting into my time) I knuckled down, completed the page and pencilled another one, and I'll hopefully have another pencilled tomorrow. I try to pencil at the weekend and ink through the week, as that's the relatively easy stage. I can pencil illos and figures fine but after a day's work - especially at the moment with all the upheaval - I don't always have the energy to sit and create a page from scratch. If the pencils are already done, inking is a far easier task to do in the evening as I don't have to work as hard as getting the drawing right in the pencilling stage (even though I end up tightening things up in the inks anyway).
I started doing my "strip a day" project on one of my lunch breaks and found I could quite easily complete a tier within that time scale but I really hated the results. I tried using a clean line for speed (somewhat influenced by Jaime Hernandez's work, although I still haven't started reading any of it!) but I think the fact that I was using a Berol (which is great for ruling lines, my new favoured tool for that) on A4 photocopy paper that left me very little space to draw anything interesting (I can see now why all the original newspaper strip art I saw in an exhibition in the States was so surprisingly large) annoyed me to the extent that I gave up the idea for now.
My reading pile has shot up again so I decided to return to reading on my lunch breaks (currently reading the Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore) but once I've cleared some stuff, I'll hopefully ink some illos in my lunch break. I'm halfway (ish) through the current project so by the time I finish the books, I'll have some pencilled illos to ink up---I want to experiment with a Mucha style for one...
Tone's helped me out big time by superbly lettering up my EC sci-fi homage, which looks alot better with the lettering as it uses the actual EC font so the pages look more authentic. I kept the script as ECish as I could and I'm quite happy with this short six-pager, despite the usual niggling art problems. Tone also took a crack at inking some of my clean line stuff with his brush technique. I'd have thought those pages would be fairly easy to ink as they're pretty open but by all accounts, they were a bugger! Hence, the whole sequence won't be inked but click on the above to marvel at Tone's lush inks (so much nicer looking than my technical pen look).
Finally, I've also posted the inked version of that Supergirl...I quite like how this has come out actually. I think I'll put in some buildings (yes, I know I hate drawing buildings but it's good to stretch yourself sometimes---I even drew voluntarily two cars today!) but I'm not sure whether to pencil shade it full size or on a reduced photocopy, before scanning it in to be coloured on the PC...
3 comments:
It's not that your pages are difficult to ink, just time consuming as they contain 63% more lines than my shoddy pencils. Will finish that second page of MJ inks when the modd strikes me.
Berols are ace, I use em for more technical lines, like the street backgrounds on that page of inks.
This gonna be a 'concept' strip about how you can't think about anything to write about? A bit like Glamorpuss then. Nice stippling though ;)
That's a really lovely Supergirl dude. Your best yet. Looking forward to seeing it all finished.
Hurry up with the rest of that EC strip, I need to know what happens next.
We're not telling you.
Post a Comment