I get asked a lot of questions about the mechanics of drawing my strip. I do a lot of them in different ways to keep from getting bored--changing up between pencils, inks, ink washes, brushes, rapidiograph technical pens and brush greyscale markers. But the most common method is plain ol' pen and ink, usually a combo of brush inks and rapidograph tech pens.

I prefer working in ink. I love the stark contrast of black and white, but I have a tendency to over cross hatch. Back when I was seriously trying to get into comics, I heard that criticism soooo often and I still struggle to stop myself from overshading and cross hatching people to death. One of the reasons I started inking so much with the brush the past year was to break that habit. But for this example we're using rapidiograph pens.

The first step in my strip is the best part. Go drink beer and see a band. Man, I love this job! In the instance, the band in question is a new punk/garage/ska band from Bloomington named Coinslot. They're fronted by a very energetic and charismatic grrl, and seem poised to make a big splash on the Indy scene.

At the show I take pics and do some light sketches. The sketches for the most part just set the mood. The main bulk of the strip is drawn from photo reference. I upload them into CorelDraw and then assemble a sheet of the best poses/shots of the band members.

After printing the sheet out, I head to my trusty basement studio.

The original art is 7.5 inches by 12 inches on Bristol board. I prefer working in ink, so my pencil drawings are really rough and sketchy at best. Usually the faces are in detail and the rest is just a "pose" before I apply the ink.

Inking is where the drawings really come to life. I go back and add the details with a brush (or in this case, a rapidiograph, size zero or one). If you look in the background, you can see I'm inking the girls' face in panel one and the 'un-inked' pencils for the guy in panel 2 are visible above my hand.

After the inks are done, I go back and do the heavy blacks and panel borders with a #3 Windsor Newton brush. In the case of this band, I did intentionally sloppy borders because it went with their raw and energetic style. I also like that it gives a bit of a 'zine quality to my little corner of NUVO.

Normally I pencil in the dialogue in the spaces I have left myself, but in this case I did the dialogue in CorelDraw with Courier font and cut and pasted it in strips. I thought this added to the DIY, punk-zine look I was going for.

I will link to the finished strip when NUVO comes out this Wednesday.

Posted by wayneb at May 23, 2006 12:33 AM