FOWP Updoodle: Inking!

Pen you my muthafucka
I’m a hold you like piss
Even when the itchy burn make me wanna let go
There you go smudgin, see actin mad funny
But you kissin loose leafs so I can’t be mad
You my confidant when I couldn’t tell pops that report card came
You signed off with me
So when the checks come you’ll be signin off with me
But when I’m dead and gone will you sign off?
Ooh Papermate you light like paper weight
But you pack ink, can make tattoos turn pussy
And when its mush time you be there like a man
in my hand spillin my heart with you blood.

~excerpt from 'If it wasn't for you' by Handsome Boy Modelling School feat De La Soul

I finished the pencil roughs last week, had a day off and then it was off to annoy happy harvard whose wildest fantasies for a friday night involve scanning a handred pages of scribble and discovering his Helvetica DVD is damaged. Or as the french say 'damajéd'.

Then I spent a bit of yesterday and much of today cropping the spine of my notebook out of the jpg scans and framing up the pages. Tedious but lightning speed compared to the pencilling.

Interestingly, I finished page 100 on wednesday, but because I had learnt to draw by drawing I knew I needed to go back and touch up the first 20 pages. Turned out I had to touch up the first 40 pages but it also turned out that I could do 20 pages a day when the layout was down.

Indeed I have discovered that drawing involves one of two things.

I told Harvard this but he shrugged it off because I suspect he was pissed that he had missed the simpsons to click buttons for me.

Anyway the two distinct processes are:

1. Thinking.

2. Filling In.

The on that takes a phenomenal amount of time is the 'thinking' part. I find it harder to think about how to construct an image than following Hoffstader's isomporphisms of his ZbT, TbE, EbZ system (whatever that is).

I sometimes I had a straight forward scene to draw, for example people running across a square. But I had to take a 30 minute break just to walk around and cogitate about how to do it. Do you just put two characters in a line running? Easy but flat and lifeless, so you skew them to be running past the readers right shoulder. That way the reader can see... what? Now you need a background, I hadn't put any thought into background. So I need some buildings, what is the architectural style of my world? How far away are they? How big are the squares? Where have the characters come from and where are they going to?

See what I mean, this is what fucked me off because in my mind these were also really boring transition scenes, and they took the most fucking thinking about.

I tell you this, even the most basic bland flat comic book artist I have newfound respect for, because they have to do it all. A fucking director has it easy, He can tell the costume person to design a costume an actor puts it on and he says 'run you fucking actor' the actor runs and the film films and it looks right.

But the comic book artist has to do all of that themselves. They have to imagine it, then put it on paper.

At anyrate I hope I have gone someway to convincing you that the thinking stage is the hardest part of drawing.

Once you've done the composition and design work, the filling in (which many would call the actual 'drawing' in drawing) is easy.

I'm hoping my next stage of filling in - inking is even easier. I doub't I'll be able to get through 20 a day, since unlike the touch ups I have to go over every single line and add some rudimentary shading and lighting effects, but it is basically un thought intensive.

btw. I know there's classic comic fonts, but does anyone know of a speech bubble tool/shape preset for photoshop?