Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá's blog

The artist.


This is an excerpt (via Newsarama) of the upcoming Dark Horse book, EISNER/MILLER, coming out in July.

MILLER: What are some of the things you love most about cartooning?

EISNER: To me, inking is sexy.

MILLER: Inking is very sexy!

EISNER: It's like downhill skiing.

MILLER: Especially brush.

EISNER: I've always used a brush.

MILLER: The brush is the most erotic tool you could work with.

Inking was, for some time, a lost art. First, the disposable pens came and replaced technical pens (those nightmares to get a grip of), who also came to try and replace the brush and the quill. After that battle, came the computer and the digital inking (which still is basically leveling the pencil to black and filling the black areas), which seemed practical in terms of time but lost a lot in which inking is most important: clear storytelling. More than applying black, it's finishing the look of the page for the images to be "read". If you think of everything the page needs and put it on the page while you're doing you pencil, your pencilled paged may already be "inked", but that is rarely the case.

Inking with a brush IS very sexy, indeed. It's not the easiest inking method to learn, but it gives a "hand made" look to the page that has no equal. Somebody was there, on that page, and left his mark.

We are storytellers when the draw the page. We are professionals when we deliver it in time.

And we feel like artists when we're inking with brush.