HOW TO DRAW COMICS:
INKING WITH A BRUSH pt 16

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

After a long delay due to pressing outside projects — one of which you can read about next door in the Bulletins section — let me get back to talking about inking, and more specifically, about inking backgrounds.

Now that we’ve inked the figures and all other foreground objects with a brush, it’s time to fill in the backgrounds. I don’t always wait till the end to ink in the backgrounds, though. Sometimes I’ll do them as I go, and sometimes I’ll wait. It all depends on how I’m feeling at the time.

More often than not, however, I ink backgrounds with a pen as opposed to a brush. I often use a Micron disposable pen, usually in the 0.1mm size, though sometimes a 0.3 or larger. Occasionally I’ll mix in a technical pen or a dip pen — if the latter, usually a crow quill.

A non-dip pen, however, offers a solid line without any variation, which allows the background to recede behind the foreground. Since the variable width of the brushed line on the foreground objects has greater dynamic power, it commands greater attention than the relatively fixed width of a pen line. For this same reason, I generally keep the width of the background lines thinner than the foreground lines, making the lines less bold and therefore less attention-grabbing.

Thinner background lines also add a sense of aerial perspective to the background. If you’re unfamiliar with the notion of aerial perspective, it states that objects of the same local color become more blue/grey as they recede into the distance, and that their values become lighter. This explains how, when looking over distant hills, the farthest ones seem hazier, bluer, and somewhat lighter than the nearest ones.

This effect is reinforced by reducing the details in the background as well. As a rule of thumb, the closer an object is, the more detail it will contain, and the higher the contrast will be between its lightest and darkest parts — by which I mean when you squint at an object in the frame, the closest objects tend to have the greatest mix of hard whites versus hard blacks, while objects that are farther away will tend more toward a single value, either all white, all black, or all one value of grey.

This rule of thumb applies mostly for simple panels. But for more complex panels, where there are a greater number of spatial layers or where you want to draw the reader’s eye between competing layers, there’s a different theory of spatial layering that comes into play that I will discuss next week.

In any case, it’s not always necessary to reduce the amount of black in the background to get it to recede. Sometimes, especially in enclosed spaces, I like my backgrounds to blend into black. This helps the background recede since the object with the greater contrast (more hard white on hard black) remains in the foreground while the background turns more toward a single value, in this case black.

By the way, when using a lot of black in the background, I’ll generally use a brush to fill this in, so much of this work may have been done concurrent with working on the foreground figures. But even if the background is mostly black, if there are straight lines or regular curves to be found I’ll usually use a pen against a straightedge or french curve or circle/ellipse template to put any of these lines in, after which I can then fill them in with the brush.

I also tend to use a brush in the background for organic textures: cave walls, trees, plants, &c.

Next Wednesday: I’ll talk about more complex panels and how to separate spatial layers using value in: Inking With a Brush, part 17!

HOW TO DRAW COMICS:
INKING WITH A BRUSH pt 17

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

Is it always necessary for backgrounds to contain less detail than foregrounds?

The answer to this, of course, is no. It all depends on the effect you are trying to achieve in a particular panel. If you want a background to recede in space in the manner of aerial perspective — as discussed last week — it usually helps to reduce the amount of detail in the background.

Sometimes, however, increasing the amount of detail can actually make an area recede.

Let’s say you draw the many individual hairs of a fur skin — all having the same length, thickness, and direction — so that when looked at from a normal reading distance the fur appears to take on a single tone. Though you may have spent hours drawing in every detail, in the end the area appears as little more than a grey tone that will tend to recede behind any nearby object with higher contrast and, in this case, fewer details.

The important thing to consider here is contrast. The use of detail, when it creates contrast to other areas around it, will attract a viewer’s attention. It is contrast, not detail, that draws a reader’s eye.

So what, exactly, do you mean by contrast?

When working in black and white, adjacent areas that differ the most in value almost always command the greatest attention. Black type on a white page. The black pupil set against the white of the eye. A black silhouette against a bright window. An explosion in the night sky.

Wherever a significant amount of black and white are set off starkly against one another, this is where your eye will surely look. Think of the spotlights in a darkened theater: your eye is naturally drawn to the highest contrast in the room.

As the value difference between two neighboring regions is reduced, to say a dark grey against a light grey, the attention demanded by that area tends to decrease accordingly, until the two values are indistinguishable and the area becomes wholly uninteresting to the eye (unless of course this new area now comes into contrast with another adjacent area).

In addition to value contrast, there are other contrasts that are also important in graphic work, particularly inking. Contrast between line direction, smooth vs. rough lines, continuous vs. broken lines, thick vs. thin lines, fixed-width vs. variable-width lines, straight vs. curved lines, and line thicknesses: all these contribute more or less to drawing a reader’s attention and leading the eye across the page.

And this is the ultimate goal of the artist as storyteller: to capture your reader’s attention, draw them in to your story, and move them from moment to moment (both within and between panels) at a pace you dictate.

Contrast helps to achieve this.

Next Wednesday: I’ll talk about spatial layers and contrasts in: Inking with a brush part 18!