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  Excuse me, is my groove in here?Oct 05, 2012 7:53 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Page 100! Always nice to reach that in an episode. And maybe this will turn out to be another milestone of sorts in the strip for me as well; after becoming thoroughly disgusted with my use of gray ink washes yesterday, I vowed to try going straight black and white--no gray tones. I tried it today and it came out better than I could have expected--the second time, at least.
 
In the first, which is so awful I won't show it--although if you buy the original art for today's page you'll get to see it, because it's on the back :P--I spent a lot of time coming up with what seemed a nice detailed sketch of Selenis' face seen from slightly below, in nifty dramatic perspective, and sketching in the shapes of the shadows I wanted her mouth, nose, eyes, eyebrows, and cheekbones casting across the rest of her face.
 
That looked fine in a pencil sketch, but when I went to ink it, and started turning those sketched shapes into big solid black blobs, it just didn't hold up--in fact it turned into this horrid black morass. I suppose it probably has to do with trying to retrace my lines--I can't do it. Or I can, but when that's all I'm doing, there's no inspiration in it and it only results in an ugly, dead thing.
 
In this second attempt, I didn't try to fill in the sketched lines, or to maintain strict fidelity to their strokes; instead I...well I guess I just did whatever happens when I don't try to do that. It's more instinctive, more gestural.
 
Anyway it kind of worked, I think. Possibly the mouth is slightly too low, and maybe I should've got the hair closer in on the face, but, you know, details. Reflecting upon it, and then looking back over the pages from the past few episodes, I noticed that just about all of what I think are the most successful among them seem to have employed that same sort of...loose massing of heavy sketched lines, or something. And reviewing them all in a group like this, I realized they all share something else, too. See if you can pick out what it is:
 
16:14
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16:69
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16:82
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16:95
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16:102
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17:6
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17:7
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17:8
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17:22
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17:66
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17:94
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Did you notice? Aside from the quick, massy lines, they also all pretty much feature a head in close-up, or close-to-close-up. I suppose almost all of my pages do, anyway, but I wonder if that's serving as a trigger for being able to get into this mode somehow--like, that kind of heavy stroke just happens to seem to my subconscious art brain to be the thing to use for heads at this viewing distance. For instance, I had a streak of it going on pages 6, 7, and 8 of this episode, but then there was a scene change and a series of longer-distance shots, and I lost it--and then I went to using a large brush exclusively for a while and that was its own distraction for a time.
 
But maybe I'm gradually getting onto something here. And maybe stripping things down to black and white will help me find out how to make it work. It happened, in fact, the other time I went straight black and white, which was page 17:22, in the list above.
 
There are other nice things about working in plain black and white for a change: it's easier to scan and clean up, leaves me free to use white ink whenever I want instead of constantly having to worry about mucking up an area I needed clear for a gray wash later, and it allows for greater abstraction. Like, I liked doing grayscale instead of color because you can bring together objects that would normally be separated by their colors; well, with black and white, you can bring to together just about anything you want! So it takes a little figuring, maybe--we'll see what happens when I need to do a scene with a deep background. But it's also fun and freeing to play around with, and I'm getting excited about where this might take things.
 
 
 
 
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