Inkink
Wow, so hey, how's it going? Miss me? I sure missed you guys. Lots of stuff has been going on. What kind of stuff you ask? Well, we had a near miss with a flash flood. There's nothing at all like feeling helpless as water creeps up to your home. I'm sure there are other things that can make someone feel helpless, I'm merely talking about that feeling. There's just nothing you can do to change what might happen. It ended fine though, so no harm done. I ran a half marathon this last weekend and it kicked my butt and various other parts of my body which are now sort of starting to recover from the trauma. I did extremely poorly, but I was expecting to, and everyone has to start somewhere, there’s basically nowhere to go but up.
I read Cell by Stephen King this week. It was ok, it didn’t blow my mind. I was honestly a little disappointed, but it’s not time I feel like I will never get back. I don’t read enough as it is, so just to finish a book is good for me. Now I’m onto the U.S. Armed Forces Survival Guide. I have my reasons.
Work has been crazy. It's still sort of crazy but it's about time I showed you my once a month (as it's becoming) drawings. When I haven’t drawn for awhile or when I’m feeling lazy about drawing(often), I always get back into it by doodling heads. I caught a thread on Warren Ellis’s Engine forum today where artists were showing their pencils and inks off, and I haven’t done a page in forever, but I thought it might be cool to share how crazy this works for me. I draw entirely with the tablet these days. I work at my computer all day and it just isn’t fast enough to draw on paper, scan it in and then go from there. So on the right you see what a sketch might look like. Sometime’s it’s even more messy than that. I often feel like I’m the only one who could possibly make sense out of what I draw in this sketch phase, but these are as detailed and clear as they get from me. I like the younger guy sketch a lot, and am already nervous about losing that energy with the inking, but I’m on my way at this point. I ink and color the young guy in flash. Now, I’ve talked before about inking in Flash, but I’m less enthusiastic about it at the moment. I’m not totally convinced that having to go back in and work the inked like out to not look like it’s done in flash is worth the upside, which is having all the art in vector art, which is fantastic for reproducing. Cleanup on top of the cleanup gets pretty labor intensive when it’s work like this, where I am trying to have a more traditional comic book look. Also, the flash coloring of work that looks like this is totally not working for me.
For the other character then, I took the sketch into photoshop and inked it there. This sucks because the image is a bitmap and if I want to print this out professionally it needs to be created at a super high dpi right off the bat, and there’s not that freedom to mess with details of the lines the way there is in flash. However, the line is more like a standard brush line for comics, and looks better. I colored this in photoshop as well, starting dark and working my way light. Between the two finished heads, I like the old man the best.
Below them, I decided to do something completely different for the inking and do my best impression of Steve “Fabricari” Harrison. For this, I used the pencil tool in Flash, which eliminates any line weight that a brush would create. You can get similar results by clicking off the line taper button on the brush tool, but even then Flash decides to mess with that line, so this is the best way to get this effect in Flash. I can then select the outside line and increase the stroke to make the line thicker. I like the effect quite a bit, but I will have to use it more to see if it works for what I am going wanting to be working on. To color the old man I went a bit different and had a white brush with the opacity set to 30 and then went over it several times. It’s an interesting effect, but not really for me I think.
Later!