The Art of Inking

Nov13
by on 13 November 2020

This is a mild repost from before. My time has been so taken up by maintaining my day job that I’ve only been able to poke at a single comic page over the last two or so months.

That page, however, was sewn up this week and it continues a trend I’ve been noticing with the pages in this chapter––I am really liking how my inks look.

The digitally drawn thumbnail for the above series.

The thing is these nice-looking pages make me a little sad. There was a deliberate choice at the beginning of Long John to keep the inking sketchy and hatched and loose. The idea has generally fallen by the wayside, especially as more brushwork got introduced, and a more thick-to-thin animation-style line (akin to the linework of my previous comic, one which was very inspired by animation) has taken over.

Initial inks from a panel of Page 6 of Chapter 5.

The problem––if it’s a problem––is that I really like how the pages for Chapter 5 are looking. There is a difference between aesthetic and style––one is natural and the other can be forced. Artists aim for the sweet spot where the two intersect. Only five chapters in I feel I’m finding that aesthetic sweet spot not only with Long John but with my own style. I am finding the margins of my stylistic ease and find between those boundaries a very large field upon which I can play.

Final inks for a panel from page 6 of Chapter 5. Note the heavier outlines on the chin and the thick-to-thin brush lines on Long John’s right shoulder in the foreground. These are all photographs of the original lineart; the scanned art will be cleaner and clearer.

I guess I’m proud that it took me over 130 pages to learn this, since that amount of pages proved to me that I was liberal in my experimentation––testing to fences to establish my limits (for this story, at least).

In the end, this page is probably one of my most well-executed pages of Long John, artistically, despite the fact that it is actually kind of boring––a page to transition from one scene to the next. But it looks good, and I’m excited to see how this more confident inking manifests in future pages of a chapter that is coming together in a really concrete and clear way.

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Chapter 5 Process

Oct30
by on 30 October 2020

I’m going to be honest––and I’m under no pretense that my statement is any different than every single person’s journey through this plague that blanketed the world around us––my day job has become 100% more difficult, time-consuming, and exhausting since the coronavirus has forced my university to work and teach and grade from home.

However, progress is being made on Chapter 5.

Unlike Chapter 4, I feel way ahead of the game in many respects. Okay, mostly in one respect––I have a title, something that came to me exceptionally late in the development of chapter 4. Chapter 5 in terms of story feels very worked out, with things like heavy dialogue scenes being much more fully formed than they usually are (nailing down the dialogue in those two Long John-Geoff scenes was like steel on a grindstone). Like Chapter 4, on the other hand, I have a cover design in the can; it’s just a sketch at this point, but it’s ready to go to paper when I find the time and inspiration.

Since production is so slow right now due to lack of time and energy in many cases, what progress I have been making is getting well documented along the way.

All of this to say, all the images in this post are from the same page and, for some reason, I really like this page a lot even though it’s simple and pretty unimpressive by the standards of what will be big splash pages and big emotional beats. I think my sentiments have been painted by the weight of the coronavirus––I was able to draw a page while being the busiest, most stressed, and drained as I’ve ever been, and it’s a good page.

Who knows when I’ll get to throw ink on it, but I really can’t wait to get to it.

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Sketch Fridays #80 – Darkhawk

Oct16
by on 16 October 2020
Sketch Fridays #80 – Darkhawk

This was drawn for my good friend, Kyrun Silva, of Taurus Comics, as part of his preorder of Long John, Volume 4 (every book order from the store comes with a free Long John sketch). Normally, I draw a Long John sketch, but knowing Kyrun––and his love for this ’90s Marvel Comics character, Darkhawk.

I was only marginally familiar with the character, seeing ads for his book in the pages of the X-Men comics I read, but beyond knowing his name and what he looked like, I was completely oblivious. So, drawing this was a lot of fun to get caught up in abbreviated time through image searches and Wikipedia articles.

Cover to Darkhawk #22 (1992). Art by Mike Manley. In an episode of the podcast, Con Artists, Kyrun told me this was his favorite cover from the Darkhawk series. Source: Marvel Comics.

Darkhawk is definitely a character that could only come from the ’90s in terms of design––edgy, the word “dark” in his name, claws, big shoulder pads, gritty action, daddy issues––but what’s interesting is that it was a character that burst from the Marvel bullpen like Athena from the head of Zeus: fully formed and ready for action. A lot of popular modern characters debuted in the pages of popular books and, if readers demanded it, they would be given the chance to break out into their own series. This was the case with characters like Wolverine, Deadpool, Punisher, and Carol Danvers’ Captain Marvel. Darkhawk, however, debuted in the first issue of his own series.

I’m not sure of his current status in the Marvel continuity, but drawing this snapshot from the ’90s when I was deep in my comics fandom was a fun, nostalgic experience, and I think that energy came through in the final drawing.

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