Something I'm Working On
This is a panel for a personal project I'm slowly working on currently as I ink Superman. I don't want to just ink all the time. I want to draw, even if its on the side just to maintain my drawing. I've learned last year via Ochlocrat that if one does not draw, you tend to lose some of the skill and it's tough getting it back.
I can't say where this is for yet, but needless to say it will come out one way or the other. Maybe not this year but most definitely next year. I drew this mostly with a Hunts #102 Crowquill, then a little of a brush and a just a little 0.8 tech pen. I've been mostly using tech pens on High Roads so I can get the dead lines (lines with constant thickness) that the art seem to require. Some comics artists I know seem to be horrified at the thought of using tech pens and not having varying line weights in the line art. I had been doing drawings like that on Wasted before so I'm comfortable with it. Using dead lines and seeing the result has an appeal that really gets me. I see myself drawing more stuff like that in the future.
However, with this drawing, I wanted to get away from that and go back to the quill centered drawing with line weights all over the place, if just to assure myself that I can still do it. It wasn't really as difficult jumping back to it as I originally thought.
The ink to this is actually black. I just played around with the color balance in Photoshop. What do you guys think? Do I keep it black or do I change it to this kind of brown? Doing it this way is actually stretching it a bit for me because I'm usually hesitant to use computers in the production of comic art. It's starting to be the big thing now, but I'm not too eager to jump into THAT bandwagon. I still prefer to draw on paper using ink that gets dirt on my fingers. Yes, the computer is just another tool, but I really think drawing completely on the computer without your hand even touching the paper is something completely different. There is no original piece of art to speak of and there is no longer any physical connection between the artist and the paper the work is imprinted on. It's corny and it's probably quickly becoming obsolete, but what the hey, I don't care. It's just the way I am I guess.
