So for anyone with a set of eyes sharper than mine (not tough — my vision’s pretty bad), you may notice something a little different about the line style in today’s installment. That’s because I tried an experiment to speed things along. Usually I do this comic in a particular order: Rough pencil or pen sketch, scan, then digital inks and colors with the Wacom tablet in Photoshop. But I’ve been thinking about trying it the other way around — digital pencils and then real pen ink over it (before scanning back into Photoshop for coloring and effects). And it actually didn’t go too badly. I picked up some decent brush pens at Blick a while back, and they gave me a decent amount of control, and definitely sped up the process (I think it only took me half an hour to ink this page, sitting comfortably on the couch instead of rigidly at my desk). But when I scanned the art, I did it as a bitmap. Now, that’s the prescribed method for scanning line art, especially if you’re doing it over non-photo blue layouts (as I was). But maybe some setting was off, because it seems like the contrast was way too high, and the lines came out a bit blotchier than I expected.

Or maybe my line work just sucked.

Either way, I don’t think it turned out too badly, and it let me loosen up a bit too. I’ll probably continue to experiment, as I’m also working on writing and drawing two other creator-owned projects right now (the first of which is in the fine Omega Comics Presents anthology you should be pre-ordering RIGHT NOW), and need to shake things up every now and then, lest I burn out completely.

So yeah. See you next week.