May 17 2012
Here’s a commission I recently completed of English Jazz singer and writer George Melly. Likenesses are always a bit of a struggle for me, and this one was no exception. I’m pretty happy with the inking and toning of this piece, though for sure. It’s headed off to its new home in Cambridge soon!
Here’re a few pics of Melly:
May 17 2012
There’s a nice write-up about Strikes, the mini-comic story I illustrated for Bret Parks (the owner of our local comics shop, Ssalefish) in today’s Winston-Salem Journal. You can find the article online here along with a short video featuring Bret and me talking about making the book. Here’s a scan of the newspaper article featuring a panel from the comic. I’ve heard tell that the full comic has been posted over at the Ssalefish forums. If so, I’ll post it here as well shortly.
May 10 2012
The show is this Saturday (5/12) from 10 am until 5 pm. I’ll be arriving fashionably late (Apparently, I can’t just leave our four-year-old at home by herself until my wife gets back into town to take over). I’ll be hawking copies of some of my books and doing sketches/commissions… but–most important–you’ll be able to get a copy of the new mini about The Empire Strikes Back that was written by Bret Parks (of our local comic shop, Ssalefish) and illustrated by me. Here’re a few panels from it:
May 07 2012
The new Jack White record is pretty great and I’ve been listening to it (and the new Spiritualized) pretty much non-stop for the last week or so. Just ’cause I had Jack White on the brain, I whipped up a quick illo of him in my sketchbook. It’s not a great likeness, but I do like the pose.
Aside from one recent freelance storyboard job, I’d never attempted digital inking. On a whim, though, I recently purchased Manga Studio and had a go inking with it here. The UI of Manga Studio is pretty dated-looking (maybe it’s better on a Mac?) but the tools seemed to me to be much, much closer than the ones in Photoshop to the feel of physical inking tools. Anyway, Jack White:
May 01 2012
If you follow my ramblings, you know that I love my Rotring Art Pen for working in my sketchbook… except for one thing: the ink refills you have to use for the pen aren’t water-fast, so you can’t sketch with the Rotring and then go over your drawing with sepia wash or watercolor. On the advice of a couple of folks, I bought a “piston converter” for the Rotring so that I could load it with non-cartridge waterproof ink. The results, though, were mixed; India ink just isn’t made to work in a fountain pen.
What I’ve always been after is my “holy grail” sketching pen: a pen that has the feel of a Rotring, but uses water-fast ink. I’ve bought a few pens that purported to be exactly that, but until recently all the pens I’d tried didn’t really make the cut. Recently, though, I saw this post at the ComicTools blog (a blog you really should be following if you draw comics, by the way) that mentioned a “carbon desk fountain pen” that cartoonist Sarah Glidden had recently purchased. Her review is here on her blog. Her portable set-up is pretty much the same as mine–Penel Aquapen for sepia wash over ink line art drawn with a sketching pen–so I decided to give the carbon pen a try. I ordered one from the always-great Jetpens.com, along with some refills.
So, here are some of the sketchbook results I got once I’d received the pen and had given it a whirl:
(Random drawings of things from a recent Vanity Fair – carbon pen and sepia wash & Sharpie.)
(A quick sketch of Ron Paul – carbon pen and sepia wash & Pentel brush pen.)
(Sketchbook page of doodles – carbon pen with watercolors.)
(Quick sketch of Raphael Saadiq – carbon pen and sepia wash & Pentel brush pen.)
It feels quite similar to a Rotring and it performed beautifully–for the most part–when wet media was applied to drawings afterwards. The only time I really got the pen to flub-up a bit was with that watercolor page above. In that heavily-crosshatched image of the guy in the hood, I went in with watercolor almost immediately after drawing him and you can see that a little bit of the black ink bled into the color. Other than that, though, I think I’m a convert. I’m betting if I’d have waited a minute or two before applying the watercolor the ink would have been completely dry.
The verdict? Well, I’ve hardly touched my Rotring since getting the carbon pen, so yeah, I guess I’ll call my “holy grail of sketching pens” a done deal.
Recent Comments