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.