Penciling and Inking
Ugh, another hard-to-see page. It doesn’t help that I draw with an extremely light 4H pencil, either. Before I start drawing anything, I pencil in the lettering, so I know basically how much space it’s going to take up. I don’t want to draw something and then have to erase it to fit in the lettering. That’d be a waste of time. so I rough in the letters and balloons first.
Then I just start to draw in whatever panel strikes my fancy. You can see I’ve jumped around a lot here. The first panel is finished, the second panel is partly done, the third panel hasn’t been started, but a whole bunch of others are also in various stages of finish. I’ve also drawn a creepy horse in the margin. I tend to doodle a lot on the margins.
After I pencilled this panel, I felt like inking the nose on the Buddha. So I did. Have I no method to my madness? No!
When I feel like I want to start inking whole panels, it’s time to get the word balloons inked in first. I start by drawing square-cornered boxes with a t-square.
Then I freehand in curves at the corners. The creepy horse has been joined by a worried-looking Bert. I tend to draw Bert a lot. I don’t know why.
Once the balloons are all pencilled and I can see whether any of them are going to break the panel borders, I can ink in the panel borders. On this page, none of them broke the panels, so I didn’t have to worry about it. Whenever someone off-panel speaks, though, I have the balloon tail extend over the border. I inked in the panels with a Pigma Graphic 1.
Your cranium must be proteicntg some very valuable brains.
Stunning work!
What kind of ink and brush do you use?
I learned that pencilers who do their own inks use blue lead for the roughs–something I’ve tried myself–so that after inking, they just scan in greyscale and they save time on erasing/erasers. Is that something you’d recommend?
For this project I’ve just been using Pigma Micron pens (in the .03, .05, and .08 sizes) and a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen with Rapidograph Ultradraw ink.
I wrote this about four years ago or so; since then I’ve switched to a blue pencil and it is absolutely something I’d recommend. I use the Prismacolor Colerase pencil in light blue (which, oddly enough, disappears better than non-photo blue when I scan.)
Les. This looks great. What are the measurements of your actual panel borders? My best guess is an inch on the sides, an inch on the bottom and a half-inch on the top? Am I close? How wide are your gutters?
Also, when you scan with blue pencils these days, do you just scan as an RBG and remove the blue, or do you still scan in grayscale?