I had originally just planned on posting my progress on the initial page of this story, but I think I’ll continue to post stuff on this story as I get it done. It’s an interesting experience that requires me to really think about my process–which is good for any artist–and it’s a good exercise that’ll help me get prepared for my recently-begun column for Silver Bullet Comics.

So, anyway…. In my posts about the fist page of the Boxing Bucket story, I talked a bit about “building up” the panels in a page by working in different colored pencils, but I thought it’d be interesting to post a page of thumbnails as it progresses through this process. So here’s the beginnings of page 2 of the Boxing Bucket story, starting with non-photo blue, then to mustard, then to orange, then red.

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Well, here’s the final inked page. I still don’t like the way the first panel turned out, but at this point I’ll chalk it up to a learning curve since I’m attempting an inking style that’s somewhat new to me. Depending on how I feel about it once all four pages are complete, I may go back and redo it yet again.

I’m pretty happy with the way the rest of the page turned out. I wound up doing most of the outline drawing with a #3 brush and I did all the hatching/stippling with a Hunts 108 nib. This is the first time I’ve done any work that required using the quill so much, and I wound up enjoying it after I got used to it. You have to reload the nib with annoying frequency, and have to be very careful not to smudge the ink, since a quill lays down a lot of ink (relative to a brush) and it stays wet a lot longer.

I drew this page at 190% of final printed size, which is the size at which I usually work, but I think that if I do another story inked this way I’ll reduce that and work a lot closer to actual size–like maybe 135%–in order to be sure that the hatching detail doesn’t get lost in the reduction or reproduction steps. For consistency’s sake, though, I’ll do the rest of this story at 190% and hope for the best.

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Normally I wouldn’t start inking until I had all of the penciled pages of the story done, but just for the sake of this experiment I decided to go ahead and ink this one page and see it through to completion.

I pretty much always start inking with a brush, then fill in smaller details with pen or crow-quill–then do shading either with crosshatching or with a duotone overlay of gray. I had it set in my min, though, that for this story I was going to attempt a Robert Crumb-style inking job using only pens, and a lot looser hatching than in normally would.

The results of this on the first panel were, unfortunately, very poor (shown on the left of the image below). So poor, in fact, that I wound up scanning the panel into Photoshop, converting the black ink to a non-photo blue, then printing that out and re-inking it with a brush in my more natural style (shown on the right). This is a pretty cluttered panel to start, which is difficult to deal with, so I’m not entirely happy with the results this second time around, but I’m gonna keep going and see how it goes.

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