Question for the artist (Storn, Nato, etc)

[THE PATRIOT]

I'm looking to see what types of pens or tips you use for inking. Also, do you prefer Photoshop or Illustrator for coloring in illustrations? Last but not least any advise on what type of layers to use for coloring (specifically grey scalled art)?

Also a question for fun. When was the last time you did a drawing and without scanning it in, colored by hand the original and make any copies of it. Thus keeping it a rare one-of-a-kind.

Thanks guys I appreciate the skills and talent you bring to all of us here.

THE PATRIOT

[Storn]

Okay. Let me break down inking into two catagories.

Pro. You wannabe a pro. Do NOT use pens, rapidiographs or tech pens. They suck. They give a dead line. They are easy. Too easy. Get yourself several #1 and #2 brushes from various companies and play around. Be prepared for tons of frustration. learning to ink with a brush is really, really hard. But you will get a lively, thick to thin line and it is what the really good inkers use.

If you want a bit more control, but a bit sketchy line, dip pens are great. All kinds of nibs are available... I suggest trying out 5 or so, different types to find your favorite.

On most of my illos , I use about 80% brush and 20% dip pen. I use dip pen for hands, fingernails, eyes...when I really, really need control in a small space.

I also highly recommend "The Art of Comic Book Inking" by Gary Martin, Dark Horse Press. It will show you the proper way of holding a brush.

Be warned, go back and look at Normals Unbound. That is my work when I'm just beginning to use the brush (and I was using a #4...WAY too big). My artwork suffered for years because my pencils were better than my inks. Now look at my current work, my inking has caught up.

Last tip, pencil your sketches very tight. Teh more decisions you have solid, the easier it is to ink.


Amateur artist: You don't want to be a pro. Ink with whatever you want. I do use Millennium Tech Pens for very mechanical stuff.. like some sailing ship diagrams I'm working on for AEG.

[Storn]

I do stuff by hand all the time. Almost every day. It is really only for Hero that I work half of it in digital and for my own yuks on my character sketches.

But fantasy hero cover is all by hand.

Most of my other fantasy clients is grayscale by hand.

All my card art for AEG is painting by hand.

[THE PATRIOT]

Thanks for the information on the book. My next questions that I have would be what kind of ink do you recommend and what kind of paper or board do you use (cold/hot pressed, thickness, etc). Also, do you recommend saving images as TIFF's or JPG's for web usage? Have you had problems posting images on discussion boards such as these using a Mac? I love my Mac but it can be frustrating at times.

I respectfully enquire this because I've read the schooling some of you guys have had and I have had to put that on hold do to twins being born 4 years ago. Also, the only art school here is MCAD (Minneapolis College of Art and Design) is the only one that teaches comic book techniques...and they charge as much as a medical school. Yikes! I'm already eating enough Hamburger Helper...ha ha.

Again thanks for the info.

[Nuadha]

I'm not an artist, but as a Mac user, I can give you a quick tip on the Mac. Make sure you save all your files in all lower case, no spaces or other characters not allowed on PCs and with the extension endings (.jpeg and whatnot) that the PCs use. It's annoying, but if you get in the habit of doing it this way, you'll save yourself a headache.

[THE PATRIOT]

Aaaah the lower case characters is where I've been screwing up. I can be such a pudding head.

[Eric Lofgren]

I respectfully enquire this because I've read the schooling some of you guys have had and I have had to put that on hold do to twins being born 4 years ago. Also, the only art school here is MCAD (Minneapolis College of Art and Design) is the only one that teaches comic book techniques...and they charge as much as a medical school. Yikes! I'm already eating enough Hamburger Helper...ha ha.

PAtriot, don't worry so much about schooling at this point. Get to it if you can, but it's not the end all be all. I never took any formal schooling at all when it comes to art, other than what I taught myself. Sometimes you really do know what's best if your heart is truly behind it all. Just find the resources you feel are necessary (such as you are doing in this thread) and go from there. There are hundreds of books out there that can assist you on your journey towards this. The most important being books on anatomy (but definitely include your own pursuits as in your own photography if you want), perspective, color theory and anything on layout and design. Drawimg Comics the Marvel Way, believe it or not is an excellent resource for all sapects of comic work. As is Dynamic Figure Drawing by Hogarth. Check your local art store or book store and see what they can provide.

As to paper, I just use a book of Strathmore Bristol smooth paper which comes in a pad form. They also have a vellum grade for pencils, which has a bit more of a tooth to it. As most of my work is tranfered digitally, though, I'm not too concerned about paper type. You could even use printer paper if you had to, as it's just going to be scanned in and editted anyway. But, it does pay to use a heavier grade of paper for longevities sake and this Strathmore paper I buy is relatively cheap at 12 to 15 bucks Canadian a pad and you get 20 sheets of 100 lb. If the project is for your own use, though, perhaps 2 or 3 ply illustration board is more what you would need.

For the record, I pretty much use just pens now. I started with a brush, but found that going with pens adds a further dimension to the look of my art that lands somewhere between comic style and straight illustration. Chris Stevens uses pens quite a bit as well. For an example of my style, just check out some of the work I did for Ninja Hero, Millenium City, CKC or The Terran Empire. You can also see a bunch of other more recent work for other companies at my website. The link is in my sig.

And as for saving your images, tiff's are the format of choice for most publishers, as they carry a lot more detail with them. They also hold the detail longer, where jpg's seriously degrade after many savings. Jpg's on the other hand can smooth out an image to give it a more rich and appealing appearance, but at a large loss of pixels. What I do is make a final 300 dpi tiff copy that goes to the publisher and for my own records, a high res 200 or 300 dpi jpg for proofing (sometimes) and a low res 72 dpi jpg for display purposes only on a forum or web gallery or my web site, etc.

Hope all that helps a little and stick with it, whatever you do.


Eric Lofgren

[Blue]

As far as the posting thing goes, I know these boards only allow certain extensions on posted attachments. I tried to post a 1 page PDF one time and it told me it was an illegal attachment.
JPG, JPEG, BMP, PNG, and typically any file in a ZIP file are okay to post.

As far as quality goes, GIFs of course are only 256 colors or less, so if you have a lot of color depth you probably don't want this, though it's fine for Grayscale. JPG has a higher color range and nearly every photoediting program allows you to adjust compression so you can make it really small with low quality or bigger with better quality.

I've never been fond of TIF files, because they never seem to be compressed enough for my storage tastes.

I'm sure the ARTISTS can give you better info. I'm not an artist, I just draw. (There's a difference)

[lemming]

Advice on graphic file formats.
Keep an original in a non-lossy format. I tend to keep mine in .png format since it has most of the advatages and none of the disadvantages.

JPG uses lossy compression. I post web images and the like using it since it's universally accepted by browsers, though PNG is commonly enough accepted. However, I do all my work in PNG before hand. Everytime you open and save a JPG file. you'll lose some information.

[Jhamin]

Originally posted by THE PATRIOT
I respectfully enquire this because I've read the schooling some of you guys have had and I have had to put that on hold do to twins being born 4 years ago. Also, the only art school here is MCAD (Minneapolis College of Art and Design)

I'm not an artist either, but my Girlfriend just graduated from the College of Visual Arts on Summit in St. Paul, and a mutual friend still goes there, so there are other schools. Not that there are any good and cheap ones.

[THE PATRIOT]

Originally posted by Jhamin
I'm not an artist either, but my Girlfriend just graduated from the College of Visual Arts on Summit in St. Paul, and a mutual friend still goes there, so there are other schools. Not that there are any good and cheap ones.

I have a great deal of respect for the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul. I mentioned MCAD because they actually or at least did have, courses in "applied graphic illustration" translation in my world-super duper hero artist. I did take an introductory course in this at MCAD and found it interesting at the time but program was in a transition with not having instructors extremely familiar with many of the electronic aspects of production.

Which brings me to this question. What's the best way, or professional way, to add word balloons to an illustration? Let me put it this way. When I've worked in Photoshop...the word balloons come out looking way too bitmaped. so there's got to be a way the pro's do this that I'm still working on. Do they have templates that you can use say in illustrator and export them onto an upper layer in photoshop? Or should I just stop using Photoshop for illustrations and teach myself how to finish my inked artwork in Illustrator or some other application?

Everybody's been a great help so far and I'm getting more useful advice than I've hoped for.

THE PATRIOT

[Nato]

I think it's really hard to give a definite answer on exactly what to use for inking. I've seen many people get great result with art pens such as Pigma Microns or tech pens like Radiographs, and then others who use dip pen nibs such as a Hunt 102. Others swear by a Winsor & Newton Series 7 #2 brush. Some ink so well with any of the above tools that it's almost impossible to tell exactly what the employed. Many use a combination of all of the above. Definitely check out Gary Martin's books. He now has a second book out that has four different pages by four different pencilers. Then each pencil page is inked by four different inkers. Then it gives you blueline pages of each pencil page for you to try it yourself. It's really helpful to see how each pages is approached by a different artist and what can be done with ink to bring out the best in a page. I'm not the world's best inker yet so I'm really practicing that hard these days. I can slowly see improvement. It's best to familiarize yourself with any tool out there for inking and learn how to pick the best tool for the job and the best tool for how you like to draw. Definitely don't just settle for one tool because it's easiest without giving others try.

I use the smooth Bristol board as well. Holds the ink better; well at least the batches I've had lately. Paper and ink quality can vary from unit to unit within the same brand. It's wierd. Paris paper might work for you too. It's made for technical drawing though and it's pretty thin, so it won't stand up to much brushwork. Bristol's the stuff for that.

Definitely follow Storn's advice on pencilling tight. It's much better to plan it all out in pencil. Then again, Steve Dillon of Preacher and Punisher fame hands in such loose pencils that it's hard to tell what's going on. He inks them himself though. He's just one of those guys.

I agree with Eric. Don't worry too much about art school. While I'm not saying that it's worthless at all, it's not the most important thing in the world. I would however suggest getting involved in a figure drawing class or group. This is one of the greatest things that help you learn to draw better. Observing the nude form is incredibly helpful.

[Nato]

Balloon Tales - This is a good site for tutorials on digital lettering.

[Nato]

Oh, just remembered something.

Frank Cho, cartoonist of Liberty Meadows and amazing illustrator, uses Micron pens for pretty much all of his inking, other than filling in major areas of black. I was pretty amazed when I heard that.

http://www.libertymeadows.com/

[JmOz]

Originally posted by Storn
Okay. Let me break down inking into two catagories.
<Clip>

Be warned, go back and look at Normals Unbound. That is my work when I'm just beginning to use the brush (and I was using a #4...WAY too big). My artwork suffered for years because my pencils were better than my inks. Now look at my current work, my inking has caught up.
<Snip>

You are to hard on your self, some of the stuff in there is dang good (The cop shooting at targets for instance is still one of my favorite pieces in any Hero book)