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  How'd Frank Miller draw Sin CityOct 18, 2012 9:13 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Why yes, I have been re-reading Frank crazypants Miller's Sin City comics lately. He does that big-black-and-white-areas-defining-form-dramatically thing so well, you know. I hadn't started out today's page intending to do something so close to that style; it was going more regular with line work and all, but parts were frustrating me--as usual--and I was trying to fix them and it was just making things worse, and finally I thought I'd better just set it aside and start over from scratch. But as often happens, while trying to start a new sketch I couldn't get the first one out of my head, and I kept looking back at it, and getting nowhere with the new sketch, and eventually there seemed to be no choice but to take the first try back up. So I started covering up a lot of things in it with white ink, and bringing black areas together into larger black areas with black ink to tidy things up, and eventually I just went kind of full bore with that approach and this is what happens, apparently--the main ingredients being: 1) frustration 2) time 3) buckets of white ink. But it's kind of nice because it really does boil things down to the core essentials, without those distracting line things all over.
 
It was so much easier to get that effect back when I was working digitally with the lasso tool. :P As I've been reading through the various collected Sin City volumes, I've been continuing to scratch my head as I've tried to figure out what tools Miller was using to get the look he got; I haven't been able to find anyone talking about it online. I don't think it's just brush work, because when he works all brush, for instance in this promotional sketch, it definitely looks a lot brushier--it's really hard to get hard, hard lines with a brush, at least as consistently as he seems to in most of the Sin City stuff.
 
For a while I was thinking he was using markers / tech pens, which a lot of artists use these days--Mike Mignola may be the most well-known example of a pure marker artist. Markers could account for the single-width "dead" lines he uses sometimes, like here around his magical ninja girl.
 
BUT! If you look closely into the black areas in scans/photos of his original art, like you can here, you notice that the swirls and patterns inside his big black areas definitely don't look like the even, regular streaky lines of a marker--they definitely look like they were filled in with a brush. So does he do just the edges with a marker, then fill them in with a brush? Well, I don't think so, because you'd most likely see a difference right around the edge between the marker ink and the brush ink--or at least an indication of where the two inks overlapped, and I can't see anything like that in these images of his originals; you do see slight variations at some of the edges, but it looks more like the variation you get in brush work between an area painted earlier and an area painted later. The blacks look very smooth from edge to edge, like here, and sometimes, like here, up close the thin lines look quite a bit more irregular than you'd expect from a marker.
 
And there are more arguments against his having used markers in Sin City. For one, this promotional sketch he did on the road, definitely in marker--which is a common tool used by comic artists for executing sketches on the road or at cons, because they're nice and quick and portable--looks way different from his actual Sin City comic page work. And secondly, he would have learned a lot about inking from the long partnership he had with veteran inker Klaus Janson--it was Janson who inked Miller's pencils in Daredevil and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns--and Janson, if the inking book I have that he wrote is any indication, is very much a devotee of the old school when it comes to inking, which means dip pens and brushes rather than markers for inking.
 
And if you look very closely at those "dead" lines of Miller's, say here, you can find ones that *do* have some width variation, like you'd get with a dip pen. And my final point I'll just toss in there is that in all of these you can see that he used a lot of white ink, which would almost certainly have to be applied with a brush.
 
And then tonight it occurred to me that with computer processing you can get brushy lines to look harder. The typical processing done to scanned ink lines, for instance, is to Threshold them, which is a Photoshop operation that converts them from the scanned grayscale range to pure black and white--that gets rid of little smudges and differences in black inks and all that, and sharpens up the edges of everything. Here's a version of today's A* page processed with a Threshold operation (before being scaled down from its 1200 dpi scan size), for instance:
 
Image
 
You'll notice that it looks "harder" than the official version of the page: the Threshold has converted the little grayish bits here and there in the scan--like the zone on her left check where I let the black and white ink merge a bit, or the very light gray under her right eyebrow where the paper dimpled slightly between wetted areas, lifting just fractionally off the scan glass and thus receiving less light and coming out marginally darker--into either pure black or pure white. It's much quicker to use Threshold rather than what I'm using now, which is to make sure the areas I want white and black in the scanned version area actually as white and black in ink as I can make them, then--after scanning--using a Level adjustment to shift dark grays to pure black, and cleaning up scanned ink ridges, dust, and other impurities in the white areas by hand. Threshold is quicker than that, but the result is harsher and less organic than I prefer for my work, and you lose the subtleties and shadings of those little grays.
 
So why am I talking about it? Oh yes, because it finally occurred to me that a lot of the lines and shapes in Sin City that had been puzzling me probably *were* done with brush, but Threshold or similar processing ended up giving them the harder look seen on the printed page. And besides that, I think he did do a lot of work with a dip pen with a stiff nib, which would let you do dead-ish lines if you wanted--and besides all that, I think he just did a lot of really, really careful brush work. The result *looks* simple but it's actually achieved by pretty painstaking work, both conceptually and in its execution (I mean, when it's done right, not my flailing :P).
 
Oh, one last comment about Miller's Sin City work. I hadn't noticed this when I originally read them some decades ago, but he varies his approach to the art slightly from volume to volume, even though they're all (primarily) black and white. In the first four, for instance, he goes through various stages of experimenting with different line widths, detail levels, and black/white balance. The fifth, Family Values, which I don't think I read before (I guess I went off to college or something after the fourth volume came out back in the day--my brother had been the one collecting them, so I'd been reading his copies) and which I just finished, is the most radical departure so far: he starts going nuts with crosshatching and white ink spatters. Crosshatching definitely isn't his strength at this point so it will be interesting to see what he does in that regard in the last two volumes.
 
 
 
 
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