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  Pencil vs ink round xOct 10, 2013 7:02 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I had some odd thoughts about style when trying to make this page, particularly when thinking about how I'd ink it, and they almost backfired. The pencils looked like this
 
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and I could tell that this was the kind of drawing whose subtle shadings would be pretty darn tough to ink. So I thought I'd forget trying to emulate all the hatched shading and go with solid black on the figures instead. I also kind of liked how Thierry's hair, not shaded in, looked, and thought maybe I'd leave it white like that in the inking--but it's funny how the balance of things changes from pencil to ink, and what looks right in pencil doesn't work in ink--anyway leaving that hair white was one thing that didn't seem to work. So the ink looked like this for a while
 
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which I found distressing. It had gone awry--not only had I sacrificed the subtle shades of hatching for solid blacks without much apparent payoff, but I had managed to screw up the translation of the faces as well; even though Thierry's face looked more or less accurate, little things here and there were off and built up into a less than satisfying conversion. In my despair over this I went so far as to try just using the photo I'd taken of the pencils as the basis for the final page, but it was too murky. So I had to go in and try to correct the inks, including repainting Selenis' face directly in ink, from scratch. My hopes were low.
 
That actually worked out okay, though, and in the course of it other things I could tweak started popping up: pushing the shading of her body more into the abstract, for instance, and correcting my usual problem of drawing women's heads too large (they're generally smaller in proportion to body size than men's heads, but I seem to be stuck on drawing them man-sized); and the correction of the tiny little inaccuracies on Thierry, although all seemed nearly inconsequential on their own, collectively brought him up to snuff somehow.
 
I guess this shows that my sense of what things will work in ink, or how a pencil drawing will translate to ink, is still a bit off after not inking for so long; I'm still seeing the pencil drawing as pencils rather than a plan for ink. I'm not sure I was all that great at that even back before I went on my all-pencil jag. Seems like something I could definitely stand to improve and which would save me a lot of time in fiddling around with the inks. Then again, a skeptical part of me says that ink is ink and pencil is pencil, and I'll get better results if I do just go off with the inks in their own direction at the end, as I had to do here--I don't think I'll ever be able to pencil a face like Selenis' final inked face came out, for instance, but it's the kind of loose, high contrast rendering I've had a hard time achieving since I left my dear old digital Lasso Tool behind. Come to think of it, the final eyes on the discarded original inked version of yesterday's page were also painted al fresco, as it were (the one on the left was black ink over white ink, and the right was white ink over black ink--I had ended up obliterating the original eyes painted over the pencils separately), and those worked out pretty well too (only the rest of the thing was kinda bleh), so maybe the all-pencil period helped me out with that sort of thing somehow. Which strikes me as odd, because what I thought I'd learned from working in pencil was a tighter, more line-intensive rendering style, whereas what seems to work better for me in ink is being able to step back and take the balance of white and black in a reduced, more abstract direction. Hum I have more to say about that but there's that sleep thing I should do for a while here first.
 
 
 
 
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