A Long Time

It has been quite a while since I've updated this little blog, but i promise to be more diligent in it's maintenance in the future.

Inking Bluelines

Lately I've been inking a lot from Bluelines.
There are a number of reasons why someone might want to ink from a blueline copy instead of from the original pencils.

Time is the reason that I am doing pages this way. My penciler can shoot me the pages as soon as he is ready to, rather than collecting a weeks worth of pencils and then couriering them to me. This allows me to begin the pages immediately and we do not lose days to FedEx. Not only does this save us valuable time it saves our publisher cash (I do hope that they appreciate it).

Blue lines have their advantages and disadvantages, but when speed is of the essence, all other considerations go out the window.

Let's consider what advantages bluelines bestow.

Clean
- there is no graphite to worry about - that means that the ink is going to dry faster as ink can float on a pool of graphite for a lot longer that it would on paper or on the inkjet ink. No graphite means that your hands stay clean (unless you drag your fist through that previously mentioned pool).

Time
- no graphite means no erasing at the end of the day, this saves time and effort as I used to be furiously erasing as the courier cooled his heels at the front door.

Paper
- Printing your own pages means that you control the quality of the paper. No gouges or slashes in the paper from a heavy handed pencil. No smells, even if the penciller is a heavy smoker. The page is as pristine as you want it to be, also if you are supplying the paper, the tooth is your choice, you can get it as smooth as you like and believe me if you ever ink on Strathmore 500 3 ply plate surface you'll never want to ink on anything else. However the paper that Marvel supplies is decent, if not great, but it is free (well, at least to me), so it is currently my paper of choice.

Now for the flip side, bluelines do have their disadvantages, and in this there are two, but they are pretty significant. Clarity and intention

Clarity
- Some times, ocasionally, the scan of the pencils is a little, well lacking. Scans should be full size and at least 300 dpi, anything smaller is just going to be too small and too poor a resolution to do anything with. Anything larger than 400 dpi is, well a waste of bandwidth. At that resolution, you will not gain enough information to make the effort worth your extra storage space. Remember that RAM is your friend and any extraneous information will slow your image manipulation program down considerably.

Intention-
Sometimes a penciller will throw three or four lines down where one is needed and it is up to the inker to determine which line is the most necessary. In the original pencils the penciller may have indicated the line with a firmer line - this intention might not be as visible in the print out as it is in the originals . It means that the inker is taking more responsibility for the final image, but may be in contradiction to the original intention.

So after all of that, what follows is my little tutorial on converting line art to blue line. The process is quite simple and once you've got this little action set up and saved the process takes little more than a couple of key strokes. While I will be demonstrating this with Adobe Photoshop CS2 the same procedure will work with other versions of photoshop. The first thing that you need to do in import an image. As I stated earlier the image should be full size and about 300 dpi (dots per inch). My penciller sends me images that gray scaled, so I generally skip the conversion to greyscale step.

1) open image in Photoshop - File/open
2) determine colour aspect -Image/mode
3) convert to greyscale - image/mode/greyscale

4) adjust levels - image/adjust/levels

5) convert to Doutone mode - image/mode doutone
6) (And this is the most interesting part) Set your colour, i set mine to cyan 25 and yellow 5, this is a little easier on the eyes that a pure blue
7) Print image to your board
8) Ink

Questions?

Milton Glaser

Yet another video, this time Milton Glaser drawing an image of William Shakespeare.

"For me, drawing has always been the most fundamental way of engaging the world."
Glaser is an artist and designer, best known for the I(Heart)NY logo, as well as the DC bullet that graced the covers of DC comics from mid 1970 until 2005.

Gary Martin Inking Video

These are not my videos.
I want to make that perfectly clear.
These following videos are of the amazing Gary Martin, the guy who wrote the book on inking.
Sit back, relax and learn something about inking.

Ink and Commitment

This is a blog that I learned about from Tim Townsend. What the author (David Apatoff) has to say about the use of ink, as opposed to graphite or other less permanent media, is, I think, amazing. A lot of what he says, is what I have thought, but have never been able to succinctly relate.

Once upon a time, a gentleman had a lovely little website dedicated to the art and science of Comic Book Inking.
He asked a lot of Inkers a few very good and succinct questions. the responses were terrific. It was a wonderful place for aspiring inkers to delve into and find clues to the art.
And then it went quietly away.
While I do not want to recreate his website, or the style of his questions. I believe that the void he left when he deleted his website needs to be filled.
Hence this blog.
My intention for this site is to provide insight into inking, through interviews, demonstrations and tutorials.
"Inking is sexy," as will Eisner once said. Man, was he ever right.