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!