Added 1 new A* page:^ That will be the last A* page I draw on the computer--at least for a while; on Monday I switch to painting them with brush and ink!
This then is the last ink practice page:
As with the previous ink practice pages, I learned a lot from this one, some of the more easily enumerated items being:
- Don't use your nice flexible sable brush to dot on the stars--it bends too much and the dots squidge around (Glen^5 and I have been discussing some other possible star-painting methods on the forum)
- Double-check the proportions of the pencil sketch, *before* you start laying down ink--can't just cut and move things around afterwards like you can digitally (*cough* her right arm *cough*...EDIT: although now that I look at the scanned version, maybe it wasn't all that far off actually) ((Well, okay so I'm scanning them into the computer so technically I *could* move them around afterward in Photoshop...would prefer to avoid that, though)
- "Smooth" paper (used here) doesn't seem to load up with as much ink as rougher paper, so the blacks don't come out quite as black--they're a bit more washy and uneven (gotta head back to the art supply store again to get the rougher "medium" Bristol, and maybe a few other odds and ends--oh like more white ink to paint stars, and cover my boo-boos)
- I get a much cleaner scan when I really weigh down the heavy (100 lb) paper (ie stacking stuff on top of it, like more paper, books, and a nice plank of wood :p), since it has "cockled" up a bit from the ink wash and isn't quite perfectly flat when left to its own devices
This was meant as something of a "dress rehearsal" for the start of the actual painted comic run on Monday, so I used the 11" x 17" smooth, acid-free (etc) Bristol paper I got for that, cut a little template frame from one of the paper pack backing boards to draw out my page drawing area (16" x 6.75"; the final area used in the actual comic page will be slightly less than that, 15.93" x 6.67", which in the 1200 dpi I use for scanning works out to 19120 x 8000 pixels, exactly 20 times the size of the final comic image (956 x 400)) on it, which you can see marked around it in pencil, particularly at the top, and composed a drawing in that framework, although I turned it sideways for a vertical piece. So if we pretended this was going to be an actual comic page, cropped and rotated and sized and all it would look like this:
So we'll see how this goes! It'll still be a bit rough at first as I'm still learning the many ins and outs of this ink painting business, but I'm pretty excited about it as I think it looks about at least as good already as what I've been drawing digitally with the Lasso Tool in Photoshop, AND it's just pretty fun to be playing with paint brushes again, not really having done it since my oil painting college days fifteen (egad!) years ago.
In some ways it's faster than working digitally since I can't just futz with an image ad infinitum; so I hope to be able to get up to two pages painted a day, once I'm up to speed. I don't see that happening next week, both because I'll probably still be a bit slow with it, and because I'll have other things to get worked out on the site to support this change, like, well, making the comic display script support jpgs, for one. :o I'll probably just make it mostly image-format-agnostic--less efficient, but more future-proof. :P
And then I gotta get a shopping script going so you'll actually be able to buy one of the original paintings, should you see one you think would go particularly well with your decor. They'll be pretty affordable because I want them to find homes! :)
And this one here will be for sale too, since it's actually on the archival-quality paper, whereas the previous ones were just on my old (OLD) and already slightly yellowed college sketch pad. Oh yeah and since this one ended up having a pretty decent and very vertical image of Selenis, I can turn that into a skyscraper banner and refresh my ad campaigns--gotta start showing off the new look! :)
I hope you guys will like it--if you don't, PLEASE let me know! :o Again, it will be a bit rough at first as I'm still getting the ink wash thing down, but bear with me for a bit and I think not too long from now it'll be looking pretty darn decent.
As it happens, I think this is also a pretty good spot in the story for this switch, as the rest of this episode will be decidedly dark and inky. :o
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