A few words about inking before we move on to annecdotes.

I'd like to take a few words to talk about the process of inking before we move away from a strictly linear approach to discussing the creative process. Thus far I have been trying to cover the process involved in creating a single page from start to finish. Inking, at least for now, will be the last chapter in this saga.

Inking is for me the longest and most involved stage of the process. It involves a good deal of precision in the hand and eye as well as focus of mind. There are a lot of choices that I make in deciding which lines to keep and which lines to throw away. Those choices ultimately determine whether or not the drawing will succeed. Success is a combination of two factors. The first is maintaining the spontaneity and energy of the sketch. The second involves adding stability to the composition by making some tough decisions about where to place your solid blacks. Lets look at maintaining the sketch in more detail first.

Maintaining the sketch means moving quickly with your instruments in some cases, in order to keep the variety of line width necessary for visual energy, and in others not making any lines at all. In some cases lines can be omitted entirely because the form is suggested by other parts of the composition. This is the hardest thing for me to do in any specific drawing. I like closed forms. They are neat and orderly.

It makes it easy for me to color within the lines.

It is also boring. Open forms imply the lighting and atmosphere that mesh together all of the distinct forms we see into a single impression that we call vision. It adds a layer of realism. Also where light "washes out" the lines it leaves room for our imagination to fill in the details and breaks the hard paths of lines that our eyes will imprison themselves to if we let them.

Leaving room for the imagination is also one of the primary benefits of large areas of solid black. Solid black is intimidating because, especially with ink, it is final. Absolute. But it is also one of the benefits that ink gives you that you cannot achieve with pencils or chalks. It is a two-edged sword because, once down on the page it cannot be revoked and the contrast is creates cannot be ignored. But that contrast is exactly what adds visual interest to the composition as a whole. Remember as a comic artist you have to think about the compositional sense of all the panels, not just the one. And, as I mentioned earlier another of its primary benefits is that it is impenetrable to the physiological eye, but not to the psychological eye; the minds eye. This leaves the reader's imagination to fill in all the details contained within the void, and as an added bonus the details you add with your own eye are usually better than anything the artist can portray.

If I cared about the "avant garde" I would tell you that this encourages reader participation and makes the creative process a shared experience ultimately resulting in the death of the author.

But I don't care about the avant garde.

Actually sketchy business this time.

When sketching I prefer mechanical pencils to wooden pencils because the sketch itself is not the finished product. My only real requirement of my implement is that it be sharp and mechanical pencils are good for that sort of thing. I start with some light establishing lines just to get some marks down on the paper. The hardest part of any stage of drawing is to get over breaking the visual tranquility of that smooth white sea of paper. Once this is done the image begins to take shape and it becomes easier to do your thinking on the paper.

The early stages of the drawing are also the place to introduce perspective. There are two ways of going about this. The first is to simply draw the perspective points and lines directly onto the sketch. This can create a lot of visual clutter and is only advisable when the perspective needed for the scene is going to be simple and direct. The other way of going about perspective, recommended for shots with complicated angles and intricate detail, requires a light box and a perspective template. This allows you to simply place the perspective lines beneath your sketch and work from there. This keeps the clutter down and allows you to see the "clean" version of your sketch simply by toggling the light box on and off. The down side to the second approach is that perspective templates are so exact that they can be intimidating. You can often over-do the perspective in a simple view that didn't need very much perspective to begin with.

I won't go into the mechanics of perspective now, and probably not later either. People have written whole books on proper perspective and the subject is simply to large to cover adequately in any fashion here. I can recommend "Perspective! For Comic Book Artists" for those who are interested in knowing more. It has been very useful to me.

With perspective established and some simple layout lines down it becomes easier to concentrate on individual areas and flesh them out as you go. I find that the sketch, clutter or no, becomes very messy at this stage and I find myself erasing a lot. I often make the same line several times, gradually getting closer to what I want each time, shelling my target like a battleship. I then go back in and clean up my mess with an eraser. I recommended a simple kneaded eraser for this process as it leaves behind no residue and usually erases cleanly. Sometimes the drawing has simply turned into one block of graphite and I feel more like a sculptor carving away my lines like a two-dimensional Michaelangelo. The effect produced is hardly displeasing however. The better the sketch is the better the finished piece will be.

That idea should hardly be revolutionary.

Sketchy Business.

Going from the thumbnail to the sketch is, for me, the hardest part of the process. In this step I have to resolve my issues with perspective, finalize all of the designs for everything that appears in the panel, and settle on the final composition for the scene. Also, this is the part where I need to be able to draw. Since this is such a big step in the process I may take several posts to cover it all. We'll just have to see how it plays out.

There are a few ways to go about doing this. One of them, which works only seldom, is to just go ahead and use your thumbnail sketch. Every other blue moon I spend enough time on a particular thumbnail study with my trusty Bic that I grow attached to it. This can be bad.

Oscar Wilde once said, "Sometimes you have to kill your little darlings." I think that often holds true with sketches, at any stage of the process. You can easily become attached to a sketch that has a good characteristic about it but is not compositionally sound or is not right for the scene. At these times, as much as you love your pretty little thumbnail, you have to take it out behind the shed with a shotgun. It's a tough choice, but that's what artists do. Artists make choices.

Every now and then you don't have to do this thing, and when one of those times comes around it is a kind day. I take this stellar pen study and I scan it onto my computer at home. Then I import it into Photoshop and I blow it up to the size that the panel will be. After this step I print it out and just use it in place of a sketch. All of my sketches wind up on computer paper one way or another. I then get to use my three-hole-punch (for future reference abbreviated 3HP) to collect them in a binder, the nefarious purpose of which we have already spoken.

Before I use my trusty 3HP though, I usually tape my sketches to the back of a sheet of bristol board, on which I have already drawn out my panel borders, and I place them on a light-box to be inked. After all that is what they are there for. But I digress.

In most cases I don't have that perfect thumbnail to work from. In truth you can only use thumbnails in panels where the subject matter may allow. You could not, for instance, use a thumbnail for an establishing shot. The reason for this is elementary. An establishing shot has far too much detail to be captured properly by a thumbnail. Thumbnails work well for figures or actions that are drawn in close, emphasizing character and motion over texture and detail. I also find myself using them for scenes of chaos, aka explosions, crashes, etc... because what you want for those images, more than anything, is dynamism. In order to get this effect you have to surrender some control, which is exactly what thumbnails take away.

In most cases, however, these specialized circumstances do not occur and it's time to bust out the pencils. I really didn't mean to run on this long about using thumbnails in stead of pencil sketches but there you have it. Welcome to the land where the tangent is king. Next time. I promise we'll get there next time.