HOW TO DRAW COMICS:
INKING WITH A BRUSH pt 10

Continuing the real-life saga of one man’s struggle against his art materials!

Before we return to talking about the marks the brush wants to make, let me digress for a moment.

While at the San Diego Comic-Con this past week, I was asked on several occasions about some of the more practical aspects of inking, so I thought I’d take today and next week to talk about my process for inking a comic page. This is by no means the only way to attack a page, but it’s the way I’ve found works best for me thus far in my inking career.

When I first started inking, I used to tape the page to a lap board to make sure the paper wouldn’t warp under the ink. Granted, I could still turn the lap board if I wished, either in my lap or resting it on my drawing table, but it was sometimes awkward to get the proper angle with the bulk and weight of the board.

I soon took the paper off the board and now rest it on my drawing table without taping it down. This way I can flip the paper quickly and easily in any direction, and this has sped up my inking considerably. And this allows me greater control over the strokes, since I can easily make them in any direction from any angle.

I usually ink on 2-ply Bristol board, so minor warping does sometimes occur at the corners of the paper after I fill in larger areas of black. However, it’s usually not enough to affect the quality of my line work. But if you’re worried about this, avoid filling large areas of black on a particular area of the page until you’ve laid down the delicate line work there.

Some people like to rule borders and work on backgrounds first. I like to jump into inking with the brush first, then, when I take breaks over the course of the day to wash out the brush or rest my hand, I’ll ink borders and sometimes work on the backgrounds with a pen. But most of the background work I save till after I’m done with the brush.

Before getting down to the actual inking though, I like to do some exercises with the brush to warm-up. I keep a piece of scratch Bristol board off to the side of the my drawing table for making practice strokes and getting off any excess ink as I work through a page. But I also use it at the beginning of my inking session to do practice exercises drawing lines of varying lengths and thicknesses to warm up my hand. I highly recommend a book called Rendering In Pen and Ink by Arthur Guptill for example exercises of this. It’s mostly about working on your pen technique, but it’s filled with lots of great exercises for developing your eye-hand coordination, all of which can be done with a brush as well.

I do a few of these exercises for ten or fifteen minutes until I get a feel for how the brush is behaving that day. This gives me a feel for how long a charge of ink will last in the brush, how fine a line I can make with the point with varying amounts of ink in the brush, how my control is that day, and so on. Only after this do I start on the page.

Next Wednesday: I’ll move on to how I start inking the page in: Inking With a Brush, part 11!