Inkin Away My Blues

Ok I love to ink, but I have always considered myself not a great inker. Really, that's understating it. I considered myself a ruinous inker. I have destroyed at least a hundred great pictures with shoddy pen work. But sometimes I saw those fleeting moments of greatness the old ink quill could offer. So I went out on a search last week and found this excellent tutorial over at the MAD blog. It's pretty simplistic, but it does what most tutorials don't, it gets down to the bottom line technical details. How close to the paper to hold your pen-type of stuff. I followed his advice, went to sketchin, and came up with some characters for a webcomic I'm writing up.

I was pretty darn pleased with how well this came out. There are a few technical problems here and there, but the overall effect is visually pleasing. Most importantly, it showed me I could take this into a comic and ink it up without a lot of hassle.

So I did a little color test, to see what the kids would look like all colorfied. I'd say my absolute favorite thing in both pictures is the girl's hair on the right. I just really like how soft that turned out.

I used a crow quill for most of it, then painted in with a thin brush, all using some craptastic Waterman Ink I had sitting around. When i really get into this comic, I'll definitely use a thicker ink for the painting, but the Waterman actually worked out pretty well for the small nib I was scribbling with.

SIDE NOTE: Make sure to go check out Goodbye Blue Monday! It's being updated weekly and you'll like it as long as you aren't my mom.