New Inking Techinque

I've been wanting to ink for a while now, but have never bothered to learn. When I've tried in the past, brushes were such a different experience than pencils that it threw me off, and I never took the time to get over that learning curve. Pens were nice, but tended to be too mechanical. I had always wanted something that would act like a pencil, but look like a brush.

I think I found the closest thing using photoshop. I now use the brush tool with opacity turned off, and set to black.

There's a different learning curve, esp when it comes to making large, straight lines, but other than that, I'm pretty happy with it, for inking things about 3 times in my life. I'm probably going to have to break down (and slow down, I like working quickly) and just use the Path tools for making long lines. Need to work on line weight, too.

This example, on the left, is from Dracula's Guest, for Visible Light Entertainment, mentioned earlier. Make with the clicky here to see a larger sample. Thanks to Kelly Sue DeConnick for hooking me up with the job.

OMG! Teh commission!

So I'm doing some commissioned work for Ben Trafford and Co., apparently for some kind of superhero video game. Maybe City Of Heroes. Idaknow. Anyhoo, I'm slowly getting them done. Here is one for Amazing Girl.

If any of the five of you who read this would like your very own original drawing for whatever sort of video game you like to use to distract yourself from the empty void of our daily existance, shoot me a line. If I need money, and have time, I'm pretty affordable.

I'm also working on a 28 page comic for Visible Light, but I don't know if I can talk about it yet, and I just finished the colors for ShadowRock for Gettosake. I look forward to their check, because my credit card, it hungers.

I just recently learned to ink using photoshop (not slamming the contrast over on pencils, but using the brush tool to actually ink it) and I'm pretty pleased with the result so far. I'll see if Visible Light will let me put up a sample page of the comic I'm doing for them, because thats what I'm using the new technique on. I'll get it up ASAP if its kosher with them.

What's great about using photoshop for inking, is that I get the idealized combination of a brush that i can use like a pen that I have always wanted. There is a bit of a learning curve with using it to draw straight, yet "natural" looking lines, but other than that, its pretty great.