I finished illustrating a page today that I thought I’d share. I’ve included the beginnings of the inks so you can see my pencils as well as the inks in progress, and the finished inks. Normailly these days I tend to run the range on tight or loose when it comes to pencils. The page really dictates how loose or tight I am. If the page has alot of people then I can be much looser as I usually want my figure work to have a little bit of an expressionistic feel. So I don’t try to be so tight except when I hit a detail that I just want to get right. Those that know me, know I actually used to be obsessive with the amount of detail and or tightness in my pencils. The problem with being too tight is that my finished work ends up looking way too stiff and inking becomes too much of a chore.
That all being said, the layout of this happened pretty quick. Once I sat down and worked out what I wanted to happen in each frame it came to me pretty quick. Unfortunately I rushed the page a bit too much and penciled it very loosely and didn’t think through alot of the details. Added to that I was trying to ink it with a Pentel Brush pen.. which is a great tool but doesnt allow me to get the detail with the brush i wanted So I ended up inking it and screwing up the first go-round. So what you’re seeing here is the second pass. I decided to pencil it a bit tighter concentrating alot on the details of the backgrounds on the first page just to make sure i got everything the way i wanted it. Then i went in and inked it with a combination of a Sable brush which gave me a much better and more natural line quality, and some Microns. Overall it was alot of fun to illustrate, just wish I had done it right to begin with.
