Striking an inky line

Details from page 10.

It's been a few weeks since I have drawn anything for the Chuffin' Billy strip. My usual delusions of modern life and ability to draw are in question. The last few days I have been watching YouTube videos of Jae Lee inking and it reminded me how much I used to enjoy drawing. I came to the conclusion that working small to be quicker at making pages has impacted my level of energy I put into 'striking an inky line'.

It was with new found enthusiasm that I set about drawing page 10. There's not much I can do for the remaining pages, as drawing big with energetic lines will make them look very different from the work I have done so far. Maybe if I feel this way I will start drawing bigger 'speed lines' with the next episode.

Layout and pencils. Chuffin' Billy episode 3 page 10.

The layout for page 10 was done with a cheap brush pen marker style pen and pencil. I am looking for shapes and spacing at this stage trying to design the panels to accommodate the speech bubbles. Using a lightpad I pencilled the panels onto a sheet of A4 cartridge paper. I could have gone direct to ink here but pencilling let's me fix a few of the many mistakes, makes the speech bubbles a bit neater and let's me design elements as I go. I use a putty rubber if needed. Both stages feel like about three hours of drawing.

Inking over the pencil lines with my dip pen and indian ink. Having deducted what the problems I'm having with drawing are, I tried putting a bit more energy into the lines. To me this equates to speed and pressure, a flick of the wrist even. No noticeable difference although I felt confident because I was being confident? Two hours to ink this maybe.

Two hours of colouring done in the usual way. Watercolour, white acrylic ink, a bit of coloured pencil. It was here that I lost all my confidence and it reached a point where I felt sick. So I threw the page in-between a few sheets of card and hid it under 20kg of weightlifting equipment for 12 hours. In the morning I returned to it, the photo above shows me finishing off a few details.

Spent three hours lettering and trying to make the colours pop in Photoshop, applying various  filters Overlayed at low opacity and using the burn and dodge tools to pick out highlights, my usual tinkering. The hand coloured page does not look as bad in daylight but it loses something in the scanning, a pale blue which turns to grey. Above are a few panels from the finished page. Final note, panels one and three had intentional spaces where I thought I could either leave blank or use just watercolour to draw in the background. This worked for panel three, not so much for panel one.