Finish with a finish....

So far, we've looked at a page from roughly the middle of my novel. I'll discuss how I go about finishing a page in preparation for turning back the clock and going to the beginning of the project.  Last installment  we looked at the full scale 17"x11" pencils. It is clear in that case the penciler -- me -- left much  for the finisher -- me -- to tidy up. As I am not a professional artist trying to make a living by turning around quality work as fast as I can schedule new projects, I have developed some habits that are good for my artistic soul, but not so good for getting the work done.

When I started out, I was more or less working in a traditional manner, creating very tight pencils and inking over them with pen and/or brush and ink. No digital tools, 100% drawing board, pencils and quality 17"x11" comic boards. I would often scan a drawing and reprint it in blue line to either rescale or eliminate problems, but my usual trick was to simply erase, erase, erase and redraw. Electric erasers are magical! Finishes were difficult, using mostly a number 2 sable and several kinds of ink as I experimented trying to find a good fit.

Then I decided to try Photoshop -- CS4 -- to speed up the process. Funny thing is, the more I learned about Photoshop, hereafter simply PS or the 'Shop, the better the finish and the slower I got. The temptation with powerful digital tools is to fine tune and perfect the product. It seems very natural to me to iterate to a final look. In PS it is (i) very easy to create loose, expressive drawings and (ii) difficult to keep them that way under the pressure of excessive editing.

I initially used PS to generate the finished art over scans of the original pencils. By the second chapter, I was 100% digital, as I used PS to generate everything from thumbnails to roughs to full pencils to finished art. It was a slow slog compared to the first chapter. So I decided after that to go back to pencil and paper for everything but the finishes for the remaining chapters (4-6). Still, the finishes for chapter 3 were excruciatingly slow to come together. I then decided for chapter 4 I would go back to ink and brush in an attempt to get some arbitrarily high percentage of the finish done quickly before taking the image back into the 'Shop for the final finish.

But one just doesn't jump into the world of ink and brush and produce work comparable to the finely tuned PS finishes I had been generating. For example, let's once again look at the first brush and ink attempt on the current page.

This is a literal interpretation of the pencils. The pencil lines -- reproduced in a light blue on decent quality paper -- are worked over using a brush and ink. I do not much like either markers or quills for inking, but brushes require a very delicate touch. Basically, you cannot actually feel anything, unlike a pencil, for example, where pressure on paper is a vital feedback tool for controlling line quality. You have to watch the tip of the brush, and you have to carefully monitor the ink load on the brush. A heavy, wet ink load has a mind of its own, producing any kind of line if the brush is not handled delicately and correctly, and a light load will crap out just when you hit a good brush stroke. Dry brush effects are a basic tool of the trade, but out of place  they can be frustrating. 

After this more or less warm-up, or practice, exercise, I inked it again with some notion of going beyond the pencils. Here again is the second ink job.

 This is more like it. I like this, and it can stand alone as the final image. Note first I eliminated a panel, the lower left image of our main character clapping on tight to the railing. We understand from the triptych leading off the page that the guy is having difficulty sleeping as the ship pitches in the heavy seas, which is reinforced by clear statement of the situation in the central panel. I like the idea of playing with the striped pattern on the mattress, letting it interact with the ship's stacks. So from a compositional point of view, the triptych and the central panel scan together to simultaneously tell the reader what is going on. Then moving to the bottom of the page, we understand our guy has left the sleeping cabin to face the tempest on deck, reinforced with a smoke.

Then into PS went this image. As I've worked on dozens of pages and several times that many panels in PS, I have gotten used to re-thinking the composition once I have a stock of images to manipulate. Again, I apparently work backwards. I don't really see the final image until I manipulate the pieces. Really, there is some kind of subconscious, back of the brain motor that drives the process. It may be the notorious left brain/right brain dialogue we've heard about lo these many years. Who knows?

Anyway, here is the final image that emerged after a day in the 'Shop.

This image captures significant features of the second, hand inked picture, but there are lots of compositional changes. Besides the interaction of the stacks and the mattress, I've added the confluence of the three smoke streams. Our guy starts to smoke in the final frame of the triptych, before he takes it outside, as we see below. In between, the great coal-stoked boilers of the transport ship billow up smoke to match and merge into the flow off-page to the right. I reconsidered the deleted lower right panel, and combined the two pencil images into a single shot, which is angled for interest by the camera moving below and shooting up. Hey, throw in a little wave splash or two and it all comes together.

No doubt some freshness is lost going from the hand inked image(s) to the final digital finish. On the other hand, there is no way I could visualize the final composition -- no matter how hard I might try -- without the digital tools. I vote in favor of the power of the composition over the interest of the ink on paper. Ideally, at some point the process will get easier. Finally, the hand inking did get me to a final stage somewhat quicker, and added some ethereal if subtle quality to the digital finish.

Next installment, the beginning of it all.....