Because this Monday was my birthday and I was going out of town on the weekend, I asked Rades if we could take a week off the “regular” comic! We agreed to do it and just have something for filler. I thought that especially since I now do most of the comic on paper that it might be interesting for you to see where I do it and what it looks like from my end.
I hope that the hand-drawn quality comes through on the comics. As mentioned briefly above, I wanted really variable line width and a lot of control over the “feel” of the drawings and the best way I have found to do that is a really fine brush and acrylic artist’s ink. It has its own quirks and peculiarities, too, like that it unfortunately starts drying out usually halfway through inking a page. It gets pretty thick and sludgy, at which point I have to get some fresh ink and clean my brush. I could use a thinner ink but the blacks don’t scan very black. Same thing with most pens. So we moved from being very high tech (100% digital for the first few years of the comic) to somewhat archaic as I measure out the boxes and draw with a pencil. The end result is something I’m proud of, though, and I’m happy we made this change.
As you can probably tell from the different pictures, my studio wasn’t exactly pristine lately. If you want to see more before and afters, I posted some on my Tumblr back when I was doing The Great Clean. It turns out I can work much better in a clean environment anyhow. Feel free to ask me any questions you might have that the pictures don’t make clear!
Looks great! Wish I had a space like that!
MAGNETIC PAINT THAT IS SO COOL
What a lovely space to work in!
Aaah, your room looks fantastic! I’m in the midst of making my own and I am definitely swiping the magnetic paint idea. That is just plain amazing.
Hah! DO keep in mind that the magnetic paint is SUPER thick and black… it left some ridges on my walls and a visible line where the paint ended (I used masking tape to mark off the magnetic area). I have heard that there’s also a powder you can mix into any colour of paint to make it magnetic but don’t have personal experience with that. I do know it took me two coats of primer and three coats of white paint to cover the magnetic paint. Such a pain! I hope your room design works out. 🙂
You did a fantastic job! Being between jobs, maybe I should follow suit. My main obstacle is that I am the stereotypical cluttered artist. Anything so neat and clean would fall beneath the fury of my messy, creative aura.
Back when I was a printmaking major in college, we had two profs: one wore a white labcoat in the studios and it was always PRISTINE. You’d never know she was around inks or solvents at all. Her polar opposite was another prof who ALWAYS had ink from his hands to his elbows and would splash solvents around with abandon.
I’m somewhere in the middle – I create a fantastic mess, but I find I work best when I have a bit of space to move and think. Though if you look at the “before” pics I put on Tumblr, it sure wasn’t always as neat. =)