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  Fiona Staples, Takehiko Inoue, Mike MignolaOct 05, 2013 11:05 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I said yesterday there were three direct artistic inspirations for this sudden switch back (sorta) to ink. Here are two of them:
 
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See I treated myself to a trip to the comic store...I figure maybe I can "afford" this once a year or something. >_> So I looked through their vast collection of collected comic editions and came up with these as the most artistically inspiring: Fiona Staples' gorgeous full color digital artwork in "Saga," and Takehiko Inoue's amazing black and white brush and pen work in "Vagabond." Like, you can't really see it in this tiny photo but that samurai dude's face is composed of like a billion tiny hatched lines--incidentally, I think that's meant to be Miyamoto Musashi. I can't say a whole lot about the story in either of these series because I haven't actually sat down and read them yet, but dang, that art.
 
Staples manages to get her main male character shirtless for a good deal of the first two "Saga" volumes, and I'm pretty sure that somewhat sinuous torso I had on the first rejected pencil drawing of Thierry yesterday (this one) was basically my subconscious attempt at a Staples torso. But more to the point, her fluid black linework is smoother than what I could do with a pencil, and that got me thinking about going back to ink.
 
I mean, while working in pencil I've been thinking constantly about other options, as I tend to do. And I have kind of missed some aspects of working in ink, like crisp, fluid lines. And Inoue's black linework in "Vagabond" got me thinking even more along those lines, especially in the spots where he supplements the gorgeous little arrays of pen lines with larger brush strokes. Really gorgeous stuff that you kind of need ink in order to do.
 
The third thing was something I heard while drawing the pencils for yesterday's page: listening to episode 18 of the Word Balloon comic book podcast, "Hellboy" artist and writer Mike Mignola in an October 24th, 2006 interview, when asked if he had concerns about other artists drawing his stories, mentioned that one worry is that the other artists might not be as good at he is as "spotting blacks," meaning identifying places around the page where an area of black ink can go; the mosaic of these black areas vs the unmarked white areas of the page more or less defines the primary light/dark balance of the composition; Mignola is very well known for his bold use of chunky black areas, ink applied with markers. So anyway as I was sketching away and filling in Thierry's torso with various hatched pencil lines for shading, I thought "heck, I could be doing that instead of trying to imply dark areas with all these gray pencil lines."
 
And this is actually something that's been nagging at me since the very first page in which I decided to go all pencil, that being episode 19, page 2
 
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because there I had actually defined, with a pencil outline, the precise area of shadow cast by Selenis' nose. It had worked very well and was part of what helped persuade me to leave off trying to match that in ink, and just stick with pencil, but in all the pencil pages since then I hadn't really gone back to that process of outlining shadow areas--instead, I had just kind of poked them into shape by starting to hatch lines in here and there. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the spotting process definitely has advantages in many situations; only, one thing that was keeping me from doing it more was that with pencil alone, even supplemented later by digital color, I didn't have a great way of filling such spotted areas in, at least not in a really consistent way that would work well with the rest of the pencil lines.
 
Basically you kind of need ink for that, or something sort of equivalent like the Lasso Tool in Photoshop that I used to use in the old days when I worked all digital. I don't want to spend all day working away on a computer screen, so that leaves ink, basically. I erased all my hatching lines inside Thierry's contours and replaced them with a single line delineating the shadowed and unshadowed areas, the black and the white. And it was surprisingly easy, since I'd already figured out the volumes when I was hatching lines here and there.
 
There was no call to use that approach on Selenis today because we're basically seeing her directly in the light, but still the ink came in handy for the sharp little hatched lines around her edges; if you check the large, 1080p version of the page, or the pure ink line work visible in the images accompanying the eBay auction of today's original art (hint, hint : D), you can see that those lines are way sharper than what I was able to do with pencil alone.
 
In fact, they're sharper than any lines I've been able to do up to this point. I'm still using the same brush I used before; the difference is the paper: when going to pencil I needed a smoother paper that would cause less breakup of the graphite lines, so I went from the heavy Canson Illustration paper I'd been using, which was great at absorbing heavy washes, and had a little bit of texture to it, to Canson's Foundation Bristol, smooth, which isn't as heavy, but is definitely smoother. And darned if that little bit of difference in tooth makes a huge difference in the kind of lines it feels like you can make on it; the rougher paper I was using before would tend to break up delicate lines--you can see that in all the little lines I tried to do in the last ink page I'd done before I gave up and switched to pencil, the final page of episode 18
 
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where the roughness of the paper causes them to skip and break up, so they look a little scattered and uneven. It's a subtle difference to look at but what a vast difference it makes in feel when you're trying to draw; this smoother paper has me finally approaching ink work as drawing rather than as painting. I should be able to do both, but I'm definitely appreciating the precise detail that finally feels like it comes easily now. I'm going to have to learn how to color over or under all this black ink--whereas with pencil lines you could--and kind of had to--apply color everywhere since the lines took up no volume of their own--and hm how to get the penciling and inking and coloring done without needing to stay up all night to get it done, but this has definitely solved some problems for me so I'm kind of excited about it. : )
 
 
 
 
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