KITTY & LOCKHEED

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock
Original Completion Date: June 1, 2014

Another round at Shadowcat and her beloved dragon. Actually this was another exercise in inking restraint, where I withheld the option of putting down any sort of hatching whatsoever.

Since I've been tinkering with this drastic change in inking style, I have found that the secret to restraint in inking is actually... restraint in drawing. I have spoken before about the compulsion to fill the page with detail (see the Alien Legion piece for reference if necessary), and how it all seems to come from an inexplicable aversion to untouched, white space on the paper. That part of my process is certainly at its highest point during inking... but I am learning that those decisions start when a pencil is in my hand. Occasionally it even rears its head during the initial blue pencil phase.

Forcing myself to resist such urges, such as in this piece, helps me consider the "how" and "why" behind all of it. I think that heavy detail I love so much is, in many ways, a partially subconscious behavior that probably started a long, long time ago in the evolution of my style. Hatching adds complexity, and visual interest... but it also serves to hide things as well.

My lines aren't as graceful as I'd like. Sure, the vector process mangled those above a bit more than I liked, but even without that step, my lines just don't seem to possess an inherent elegance like those in the works of Josh Middleton or even Paul Smith. Perhaps deep down I'm not happy about it, and I'm subconsciously hiding something that I don't like in my own work?? We can dig as deep as we'd like here about the psychological foundations of an artist's drawing style... but I do think I've arrived to the conclusion that less detail will come much easier if I focus on the quality and grace of my lines.

So in other words, I'm switching to a much softer graphite tomorrow, haha!!

COMPULSIVE DETAIL vs. RESTRAINT, or INKING ANGELS AND DEVILS

Yes, that's a picture of me inking, with a devil of sorts on one shoulder, and an angel on the other. If you look closer, however, you might realize that one side of the drawing is inked in an entirely different manner than the other. The devil, or my inking devil, as it were, is Arthur Adams, probably the single biggest influence on my entire pursuit of comic book illustration and just a huge influence in general since his big-league debut in Longshot #1.

Arthur Adams's Man-Thing

Arthur Adams is a beast for detail, to the extent that he's developed it into its own medium-- he seems to use ludicrous detail the way other artists wield acrylics or oils. He's taken it to an entirely different plane over the years. And, not surprisingly, he's had a reputation of sorts for not getting his books in on time.

Now I'm not going to go so far to presume that I draw, ink, or even wield detail to the extent that Mr. Adams does. But his work, and my longtime fascination with it, has inspired me to develop a style that really puts down a lot of ink, usually in small, and not always clean lines in hatching.

My Own Daredevil, with plenty of hatching

In the Daredevil piece above, you can see me sort of getting carried away with the inks, almost not knowing when to stop. The hatching is intended to develop form and promote the illusion of mass in his body, but very often I'm only flattening things out. In other words, I ink to the point of excess.

And I've recently acknowledged it, and am trying to stop.

--

The inking angel depicted above is, sadly, a real angel. The super-talented and super-nice guy Mike Wieringo tragically passed away in 2007 in the midst of a celebrated career as a comic book artist, and left a multitude of loyal fans to wonder what might have been. I met Mike in Baltimore a few years before his death, and I found him to be friendly, accommodating, and honest.

Mike Wieringo's Fantastic Four

Mike's own style certainly had its share of detractors, but he was also on my short list of artists to watch and be inspired by. And unlike Arthur Adams, Mike's style was greatly reserved and simplistic. There's no hatching, no heavy and laborious working, and seemingly no effort. Quite simply, he's the day to Arthur Adams' blackest india ink night.

Since I've gotten back into this style of artwork just a few short months ago, I've really struggled to find my own voice or signature style as an inker. I love the Adams look but certainly don't want to just mimic it-- plus I worry about becoming an artist who just can't work quickly enough because of all the detail. On the other end of the spectrum is Wieringo, who draws so differently than I do that I'm not sure how good such a simplistic style would look over my pencils. Either way, I think there's a fine balance between the two to be found, and I've spent some time recently exploring that balance.

My Own Flash, with no hatching whatsoever

In the Flash piece above, I laid down the law to myself:  NO HATCHING. NONE. And I think I still tried to cheat in a few places. But, as a professor, one of the greatest things I've learned in art projects is that by withholding certain practices or techniques, a student can learn to appreciate, execute, and better identify the need for other techniques. So I turned the tables on myself here, and learned quite a bit from my temporary ban on hatching. Mostly I learned how natural it was for me to just overwork things, and HATCH FOR THE SAKE OF HATCHING. Not good, and certainly not necessary.

I anticipate this to be an ongoing battle as I settle in to a more comfortable style. But I thought it might be worth sharing the struggle between the angels and devils.

DARRELL

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored

Original Creation Date: Ink Completed Mar 26, 2014

Color Completed May 2, 2014

It's fair to say that in the past, I have had a problem with detail. Things just weren't finished until I added in extraneous details and obliterated large areas of white space. Sometimes I would throw in the occasional Easter egg for a watchful eye, or an inside joke for my friends, but mostly I would just add in this excessive detail into my pieces. As if the blank page was just a hapless village just waiting to be razed and pillaged. I just couldn't help myself.

Let's call it "Compulsive Detail."

Of course, this is not a good thing. During the creation of this commissioned piece the issue really emerged as a problem. I couldn't stop adding detail in the inking, which only served to flatten the piece out, and hindered the magnitude of the focal point. For the colorist, also myself, it became harder to work with, and also stretched out the entire process. As I've said many times before, every drawing is a lesson to be learned, but this one really taught me much about what I do, why I do it, and the consequences my decisions make on other steps of the process.

I let the compulsion issues play themselves out here, and as you can see in the final ink above, the drawing lacks clarity. It's flat. Once into the coloring process, I was able to create distance between foreground and background with color temperature contrast, but the final result was still too bright, too splotchy (see bottom left). So I brought down the saturation in the background areas, which not only helped push the hero further towards the viewer but also added a nice gloomy feel which suited the Walking Dead nicely. I even considered doing some selective color (see bottom right), but thought the whole thing just kind of reeked of bad wedding photography; It might have looked nicer had I originally colored those areas as grayscale, but post-converting the original color job just didn't work out. In the end I employed a healthy dose of my old friend Gaussian Blur to the background areas, and the piece finally announced that it was complete.


Lots of good lessons learned on this one. As I said, this was done over the course of the past few weeks, and many of the conclusions I'd come to on this piece benefitted other drawings already posted.
Yes, I've certainly been diagnosed with Compulsive Detail, and the prescription is Restraint Inking.

Also, who doesn't love Darrell? I'll probably do another one of him again, most likely more of a character study and less of an environment.

GREETINGS FROM THANAGAR

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored

Original Creation Date: Apr 26 2014

This thing, very small, was part of the inking experiments last week. It borders on cartoonish, mostly because I was trying to limit myself to a certain pen size.  Not the best ink job, but I enjoyed the coloring.

Also, Hawkman is really weird. I never truly appreciated how unique his color scheme is, however.

A FANTASTIC WAY TO RELAX

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored

Original Creation Date: Apr 29 2014

Just a quick character study, really, but one that focused on implementing some new inking ideologies and techniques I've been engrossed in lately. Hatching, I've found, is like black pepper; it does wonders to some meals but can quickly ruin them if used too abundantly.

In the days to come I may attempt a more elaborate post describing exactly how I've gotten here. Quite simply, I've pretty much torn down my entire inking style and started over from scratch, focusing on restraint and a more selective approach at decision-making. I make too many marks, too many lines, and at times it seems to radiate a sense of being just short of authentic. Moving forward my inks will likely have a different feel, or at the very least fall somewhere between how they were, and well, what you see above.  I just feel this has been long overdue, and while I'm still deciding how and where this will lead, I think this drawing really showcases a sea change in my inking approach.