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.

MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU

Pencil on Standard Stock

Original Creation Date: May 4, 2014

Happy May the 4th aka Star Wars Day! I was a kid during the heyday of the original trilogy, and like so many men my age today, it had a profound influence on the development of my imagination and creativity.

Technically speaking, I'm really looking forward to inking this one. This was also my first official reintroduction of the Blue Prismacolor Non-Repro pencil into my process-- And I don't know what I was thinking not grabbing it before! As wonderful as advertised, and I plan on using them heavily moving forward.

WOLVERINE RAMPAGE

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored

Original Creation Date: May 2 2014

What started out as a quick pose sketch of Wolverine quickly evolved into a full-blown partial background, with the intent of providing a full environment to continue my inking experiments on top of. Lots of fun to draw him all ripped up like that.

However, I also went against my own usual method and put some heavy, soft graphite into the pencil drawing itself, and ultimately decided to try and flesh it out enough to attempt a direct digital ink job. I've already done some digital inking on my Michigan comic strip in the past, but with mixed emotions on the results. In some ways, penciling for direct ink seems to be more work, since I always seem to spend more time trying to recreate the graphic quality that inking lines naturally possess. It just seems less spontaneous, less authentic.

Digital Inking Attempt 1

Digital Inking Attempt 2

Digital Inking Attempt 3

As seen above, I took several passes at this, both in Photoshop and Illustrator, to achieve the final look I have in my mind.  Unfortunately, all of these are too loose, too muddy, or too sparse to satisfy my aesthetic sensibilities. I just see it differently, and probably won't be happy with this until I get it there.

In this particular piece, the lesson learned is that if I am going to do direct pencil work, I'm going to have to spend more time refining the background lines, drawn in a tight 3H as opposed to the figure's  bold 5B marks. As a result, several elements in the background-- the tree, some of the ninja fodder, even the pagoda-- just aren't tight enough.

I think I may sit down and ink this guy after all. Although it's sure to be a great big mess now with all that graphite all over the place. Still, some great lessons learned, and it's still likely to be my best take on a very popular character.

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.