Monday, May 22, 2006

Stage 2: Let the inking begin!


Ok, so here we are back with the illustration I began with a pencil sketch. In this stage I'm inking in the background items such as the bed, pillows, furniture etc. Art rules day it's better to finish drawings from back to front, meaning you ink or refine the stuff that's in the background first and work your way to the front of the picture, or foreground. It helps to also use a thinner line on the stuff that's in the background and a thicker line on figures closer to the camera or viewer. Will Eisner, the creator of The Spirit, would use a thin crow quill pen to create thin lines for his backgrounds and a sable brush for a thicker line on his human figures. This is a great technique for creating depth. Knowing these rules intellectually and using them are two different things, however. I tend to not think about how I do a picture when I'm doing it and more than likely will start at one corner of the page and begin inking straight through jumping around from figures to background. But, as I've been told more than once, it's good to know the rules before you go breaking them. Anywho, next time, we'll finish this bad boy...