I would lay out the panels and word balloons in Freehand (which doesn't even exist anymore; swallowed up by Adobe), then print it out and draw the art on the printout in pencil. I'd then give the penciled sheet to KW, who would ink over it. Pretty much just like real comics are made.
Because all my pencils were inked over, no samples survive save this one I scanned for some reason. I include it here for comparison purposes. Those are my pencils at the top, and KW's inks over them below.
It's interesting to me to see the subtle differences between the two samples. By the way, most comic artists don't go into nearly as much detail as I did when they pencil their work. They usually draw fairly tight characters and then sort of rough in the background. My penciled art was way off the deep end as far as detail was concerned. But then I was never one to follow the rules.
I like both versions. If this was meant to be more like a Sunday Comic Strip in its design, or straight-to-web, then I can see why KW would keep the inks more graphic instead of sticking super-close to the tight pencils. Just out of curiosity, have you ever played around with adjusting the contrast of high-quality pencil scans ? You can sometimes tweak them just right to look like they have been inked. The tough part is eliminating erasures and errors, but with new-fangled graphics tablets, that can be done to perfection. Great stuff. Would love to see more from this series~!
ReplyDeleteThanks! Yeah, this was laid out like a Sunday comic. And yes, I thought about just scanning the pencils and using those as the final art.
ReplyDeleteMaybe some day we'll do more Shrunken-Head Joe. Right now time is the enemy.