Before and After

The last several sessions on The Project have been an exercise in revisiting some older pages. In fact, in the sample you can see to the left the subject is the very first page that I started experimenting with seriously for developing and learning production techniques.

Back then I was doing my inking digitally, and I ended up with work that I did not like the look of. I hate the clean straight lines that resulted. Also it was too slow on the computer to control the brush with the fidelity I wanted…various other things bothered me as well, which I won’t trouble you with, but overall I did not like the kind of results I got for the amount of time invested.

Most of all, as I’ve said here before, inking digitally just lost too much of the pencil feel I love, and that I want to survive in the final work. Eventually I began to hate doing things that way and found other methods, and adapted my workflow to suit. This happened gradually, and the better results showed up on later pages, but I’d never returned to the original experiment page and finished up the artwork there (although the figures were later redone and can be seen in the older example below). Some more recent posts have discussed some of this. See here, here and here, for example.

So I re-inked the entire page recently (you’re seeing only a small corner of it here) the way I like to now – actual pen-nibs dipped in a jar of ink, bringing it into Illustrator later to complete the color work the way I’ve always done. (Note that I will possibly also do colour work directly on pencils for some of the project too. I’ve shown you some examples in earlier posts…) I also improved the figures a bit (still might enlarge the heads slightly…), and placed other figures in the background to make the page more rich.

Anyway, in the example, the top one (still with touches to do here and there) is the revisit… In case it was not clear! (Click for slightly larger views.)

-cvj