Added 1 new A* page:
If the lines in today's page have more of a Xeroxed look than usual, it's because that silly thing I said yesterday that I had a feeling I was going to try today...did not work, and I foolishly neglected to keep a good backup plan. Basically, I had the brainwave late yesterday, after looking through the ink work from the previous episode and pining for those nice thick black areas and relatively clean ink lines, that I'd go back to ink, and then do digital color over that like I've been doing recently over pencils, so I'd have the full pencil->ink->color trifecta going on, just like a real comic! Man!
The problem with this is that apparently I'm still an awful optimist in certain ways, to the extent that I was able to ignore/forget all the frustrations I had with ink, and how I'd already tried inking two of the pencil pages I did earlier in this episode and neither one had been improved by the ink. No, for some reason it was all going to work out fabulously this time, it would be my triumphant return to ink, and I gayly brushed aside the little voice in my head that said "hey maybe you should scan those pencils just in case before you put ink on them." What could go wrong?
Well I got the ink all done and then realized it had, as before, lost critical meaning from the pencil stage, because you know I'm not really an inker when it comes to using a brush, I'm more of a painter, and that means I'm not very good at drawing inside (or along) the lines once I get a wet brush in my hand. I'm not going to post the inked version directly because I think it's unduly ugly, but if you want you can see it right here.
The lines for today's page, then, came from a photo I happened to take of the pencils. This photo, in fact
so if you look at the finished page, you'll see two little black hemispherical areas down near the bottom just right of center, and those are my fingertips that I didn't bother Photoshopping out.
So that was kind of a shambles. Hopefully this third attempt to improve upon pencils with inks will finally teach me to stick with pencils. Another lesson came out of it that I think could be helpful, at least, and that is that I do better when I cut loose and don't worry about the exact final result; I struggled and erased and redrew and smudged and so forth with the pencil work today, because I didn't think I'd be keeping any of it, so I didn't think I needed to keep it nice and pristine, and although the final pencil drawing definitely has some weird issues that maybe I would've handled better if I'd been able to make myself get a full night's sleep, it did improve quite a bit over the initial efforts, and I think the final result, for all the struggle, has a fuller feel to it than pages where I carefully lay down some lines (maybe carefully erasing and starting over a few times) and try very hard not to mess them up. And really my favorite pencil pages from this episode, like 2 and 81, have been the results of making a big mess for a while. I keep telling myself that I do better when I cut loose but I haven't really been doing it, so I've really got to do better at letting go and not being so darn precious (to borrow an expression from Sean Murphy) about it all.
So yeah, pencil. Final page of this episode tomorrow.
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