HOW TO DRAW COMICS:
INKING WITH A BRUSH pt 11

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

Some inkers work from the upper left of a page to the lower right, following the natural order that Westerners read. Other artists work from lower right to upper left, which has the advantage of not smudging any pencils where you haven’t already inked. Still others spot their blacks first, that is, they find the areas with large concentrations of black and fill these in, or at least outline them, so they can get a sense of the overall composition of the page (since almost nothing has a greater impact on this than your largest areas of black — step across the room and squint your eyes at a page and you’ll see what I mean). Finally, some artists simply work on whatever interests them at the moment as their whims dictate.

I usually start at the top, attacking whatever is easiest in the first or second panel – that is, unless I’m working over pencils (I tend to work over bluelines, something I’ll discuss later) or my hand is sweaty, in which case I’ll start in the lower right so I don’t smear the pencils or get too much hand oil on the surface of the paper. A sweaty page can resist ink and cause the paper to warp, so be careful if you work in a hot room. Some artists wear white cotton gloves with the thumb and forefinger cut out for just this reason.

On to inking. The first thing I like to do is find an area of all black in the first panel I’m working on. I dip the brush in ink, wipe it gently on the lip of the ink bottle to get off the excess, then lay down some ink within this black area. A fully charged brush is going to give you wide lines that are difficult to control, so I like to paint some of the ink into this black area until I can get the brush to come to a nice point. If there’s no black on the page, or if you prefer, you can do this on a separate sheet of paper. In either case, I recommend you make at minimum a couple of practice strokes with the brush after dipping it in ink, just so you know what kind of lines you can make with that particular ink charge. As you gain experience you’ll start to recognize what lines work best with the various charges of ink in your brush.

Back to my process: After I practice a few strokes within this black area and am confident in the thickness of the stroke I can make, I move on to the thicker lines in the panel, since these are more naturally done with a full brush. Don’t try to go for detail right away with a full brush unless you are very experienced or sure-handed (even then it’s not recommended). Otherwise you’ll end up with thicker lines than you’d like, or worse, a line with uncontrolled thickness. Control is what you’re going for, so don’t fight your brush to get it. Go with what the brush wants to do.

If I have long flowing lines to draw on the page, like the contour of a face in a big close-up for instance, I tend to wait until I’m fully warmed up and have confidence in my stroke. Drawing long flowing lines with exactly the right curve and variations in thickness is a difficult task and one you want confidence for. So I try to build up my confidence over the course of the page, meaning I generally start on shorter lines, say on clothes wrinkles, things that won’t be terribly noticeable if you make a mistake.

(One side note that I think belongs here: Don’t put too much pressure on yourself about getting things perfect. Inking is a process and not everything will turn out like you hope or expect. Sometimes things will look better, sometimes they won’t. The point is to just keep doing it, and over time you’ll start to figure out how to get your lines to look like what you want them to look like. And at the end of the day, there’s always touching up with white paint. You’d be surprised how easy it is to fix a crummy line with a little Pro-White!)

I find my first hour or so with the brush is not my best work. Even after the exercises, it usually takes me an hour or two to be really comfortable and confident with the brush. The middle of the day is almost always when I do my best work, when I’m warmed up but before my hand and eyes start to get tired.

This is when I try to do the most important figure work on the page: large figures that command a lot of attention from the viewer, close ups of faces, long flowing outlines, anything where I’ll need to be my best.

Next Wednesday: I’ll talk more about when to draw what on the page in: Inking With a Brush, part 12!