Added 1 new A* page:As not infrequently happens, I was frustrated with the result of yesterday's A* drawing efforts, and even with ink in general; I realize now that I'd been trying more and more to achieve certain surface effects in ink, like various gray tones using dry brush, lithographic-style line hatching detail, and so forth, and these took a long time but still came out rather...grungy looking, and not in a way I'd intended. I often flip back to the digital work I did on A* with Photoshop's Lasso Tool, and yearning for the lasso's snap and cleanliness, I dredged up the ol' drawing tablet--for some minutes I thought it had expired due to a year and a half of neglect, but then I remembered the little power switch on the side :p--and did a sketch of nothing in particular
and it was heartbreaking to see how neat and bold and energetic it came out in just a few minutes of tabletting--although those few minutes were sufficient to remind me of one of the major reasons why I stopped using the tablet, because my wrist hurt for hours afterward. ;P Still, it was upsetting...until I got to thinking about it, and realized that some recent ink efforts had achieved a not entirely dissimilar strength of black and white design. I called these up and, considering them, it occurred to me that to each of them I had devoted some forethought to how the black and white areas would map out and serve to create a cohesive, strong image--and that I've begun to neglect that kind of planning sometimes in favor of a pursuit of surface effects. Some of those relatively lasso-y ink examples from this current episode include page 16
parts of page 65
and page 76, which also had a nice surface effect in the lower right, which was accidental, the result of ink not absorbing easily into parts of the paper that had already absorbed oil from my hand where I had held the page while sketching:
And I think it was that accidental texture that had triggered the subsequent obsession with surface effects--an effort that did not, I think, work out in the end; they're passable in small doses, but used over too large an area, they just look confusing and messy.
There were also some recent sketches with the lasso-style clarity and vivacity, and in fact it was a desire to rekindle that kind of liveliness that had got me into squeezing in some sketches in recent months; anyway the two more successful in that line were this one and this one, I think.
So that review gave me some hope that I *can* translate the things I like about lasso drawing into ink--it just requires a little more deliberate planning, and a conscious effort to keep the drawing loose and quick in the face of the much greater accuracy pencil and paper offers over the relatively slick tablet surface; and besides all that, I've learned that the brush can create a much wider variety of marks than the lasso can. With today's A* page, then, I tried to pay attention to those things, and not to rely on surface effects so much, and I think the result is more graphic and easily read than many of the other pages I've done in recent weeks. There is much room for improvement in this vein, but that just gives me more motivation to stick at it. So I'll be working on this, and do let me know if you have any thoughts on the subject!
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Oh yeah, I forgot I had a photo of today's page at the early inking stage:
And I got pretty good feedback so far on the lasso sketch...more than I've gotten on any regular A* page in some time, at least. Which is nice, but also frustrating, because if I can't get things going in an equally appealing fashion in ink, then the only thing I can think I could possibly try--and this would still be a come down in some ways, for instance it's much easier on the eyes and body to sit at a drawing table rather than a monitor all day, and then there's the potential actual income to be had from sales of original art when working in ink; not to mention that fiddling around digitally is so easy that you don't really improve much at drawing things, because you can almost just fiddle around not knowing how to draw what you're drawing, but eventually it kinda comes out right--would be mounting a Cintiq on my drawing board, so as to be able to work with a stylus at the correct height and angle that *maybe* wouldn't annoy my wrist too much...but that's a very expensive experiment. Hrm so I'll be trying to bring the ink work up to snuff for the time being I guess.
Hm another point is that I posted that lasso drawing during the afternoon, whereas my usual updates haven't been making it up until bizarre hours when the vast majority of my audience isn't online. If I can keep working briskly maybe I can finally correct that!
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