Forward and backwards 🇺🇸
just like dancing?
I wish I could smell the flowers on my garden and I enter the spring of the South Hemisphere, but these days I smell only fresh paint and the dust from sanding the walls. Working while the painters do their thing on my house has been challenging, and demand some adjustments on my work routine, one being drawing (or trying to) completely digital. I still remember talking to Becky Cloonan, Cameron Stewart and Babs Tarr about it when they came to Brazil ten years ago or so, and watching Babs draw Batgirl pages on the bus on the way to the convention and back. Shortly after, my brother and I partnered up with Wacon and started practicing on the Cintiq. We managed to be pleased enough with how our pencil stage of the pages got working digitally, but it wasn’t until we started working with an iPad that our digital inking started to have the look and the range of something we could do on paper. Nowadays, we use all tools we can, drawing on paper or digitally (using either proCreate or ClipStudio) , coloring in watercolors or on Photoshop, and we’re still learning how to improve on every medium. Loose drawings and sketches, like the Batman one I did this weekend (for Batman Day), make me optimistic about my digital work and the narrative possibility of future projects, but some images still demand the experience and confidence I only have when working on paper.
I’m trying to finish a cover this week, working digitally at home, but whenever I try to ink parts of it, it doesn’t look right. Parts of it look okay, but they don’t look like I drew them. So much of my style is in the (traditional, brush on paper) inking, and most of the time I’m adapting the artistic choices I make while drawing when I only have digital brushes to choose from, so the end results look, well, different.
I move forward a bit, then back. Constantly learning, constantly trying new things. Patiently working through this weird learning curve.
The solution right now might be to work on something else during the day (scripts or character sketches for the big story we’re working on) and work on the cover back in my studio, on paper, after the painters leave for the day. I see some long nights in my horizon.
Be safe. Be kind. Be curious.
Pa-ZOW!
Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
September 23rd, 2024