Straight to inking

I guess Bá and I weren't the only ones impressed by the link to a 26 page story done in ONE day by this incredible french artist called Boulet. You can check out the story clicking here. It's a funny and nice story on its own, but to think it was done in 26 hours is insane. It's one page per hour.
Poking around the web, I found some videos of the guy drawing, and discovered that he doesn't pencil his pages, going straight to inking. Check it out.
Bá and I got all kinds of excited about this and, during some coffee breaks, we tried out hand at drawing straight with pens. Bá's version in the one with blue pen, mine is the other one, in black.

"Drawing straight with a pen is EASY" is what Bá is saying to me on his drawing.
I don't know if it's easy.
But it sure is fun.

GULA inking and the DHP variant

I love inking.
I made a video of some of the inking on my new Casanova GULA cover.
I hope you like it.


Also on the cover front, the folks at Dark Horse Comics announced my variant cover to the second issue of the new Dark Horse Presents anthology. I'm thrilled to do a cover for this comic book. I still remember how hugely influential it was to me to buy Dark Horse Presents when Sin City just appeared on the anthology, or when I read a Hellboy story in it. And then, when the anthology relaunched online, I was super happy to be part of it with Sugarshock, and now it seems the anthology's path crossed with mine once more. I really like the fantasy and science fiction feel of this cover, an homage to some of the greatest things to explore in comics form.

Here's the sketch and final version side by side, to show how much I really saw on the initial idea, and before that doing the final version was way easier.

inbetween

automatic Cafard

Done today while teaching some brush techniques.

Doodling

The drawings above were made on the actual pages of my script yesterday while Bá and I were talking with Grampá and Rafa, who were visiting (by visiting you can read "using our scanner"). These fast sketches, the kind you draw while you're talking, are good studies, and good fun. Seeing Grampá's new pages was also great fun, and following the more than 100 pages Rafa had to show was mind blowing. It's great for an artist to see other artist's works, there's a mutual inspiration, an energy that we don't get only looking at your own work. When you see greatness, you want to do great things.

Bá and I are always talking that we don't sketch often enough anymore. Simple drawings are delicious and we should fit them into our daily breaks.

Yesterday, we were on a meeting and there was paper and pencils on the table. It was just a talking kind of meeting, but I grabbed a piece of paper and started doodling. I drew the woman who were doing most of the talking, who had a big ring on her right hand, and who smoked a lot. It was cold, and her coat looked warm. For woman's standards, her hair was short.

After the meeting, I folded the piece of paper and put it in my pocket. When we came back to the studio, I saw the sketch again and decided it was okay. It felt nice to do it, because I did it for kicks.

We should all do some things just for the fun of it.

Soon

Inking with a brush

Bá caught me inking one of the most recent pages in video. We were talking to a young brazilian cartoonist who was here at the studio, and he's the one dong most of the talking at the beginning of the video, then there's the silence I fall into every time I ink, and then there are the small talk Bá and I exchange when we're drawing, which can be very confusing to the outsiders in its half finished sentences and inside references.

But the inking is nice, I guess, and maybe we could do these video things more often. Maybe when I'm not drawing the last issue with a lot of surprises, we could show me inking a more interesting portion of a page.

Talking about style back in the day.

I've done these series of drawings to use on a class about inking and style. They were all done based on a photograph, so none of them show what my style really is, but they show 4 different ways to draw the same scene.



Your style is the way you chose to show things or to say things. It's all you've chosen to put in and all you left out.



If you're looking at a photograph, you see all that's there to see, all that was captured by the lenses and when you want to draw that, you have to chose what is important for the drawing and what is useless information. All those things you find important, all the details that make it into the picture, they are defined by your style.



When you're not looking at a picture to draw something, you'll have to make all the decisions of what goes in and what stays out in your mind. For something like that to really work, you must know very well the subject you're gonna draw. And that's when live drawing comes very handy. The more live drawing sketches you make, the more studies you do, more "visual vocabulary" you get to enable you to draw anything you want in your own style.



There's no right or wrong, better or worse. I can't say a clean sharp style like Mignola's is better than a very scratchy dirty "detailed" art like McFarlane's, a cartoony style like Jeff Smith's or the very photo-realistic cinematic style of Bryan Hitch. You all know I'm teasing you and all I could say would be a matter of personal taste, but what really matters in the end is that all the choices you make work in favor of the story. Your art should help you tell the story and not distract the eyes of the reader.

There are endless bits of information in every single panel you make and it's up to you to chose what will help you tell your story and what's useless lines in a piece of paper.