I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

But that doesn't mean I should stop looking.

I finished the most time consuming page of this current chapter I’m drawing this past week. It probably took me three working days just to ink it. I’m excited to see if I can up my game for the remaining pages I have left for this issue, keeping my September deadline.

I’m going to tell you a strange detail about this particular page. For two panels, I used my iPad as a light table and drew on the paper on top of the sketch done on the iPad.

It was not as simple as I would have hoped.

How did this came to be?

Well, I can say it involves ants building a nest inside my printer and clogging the inner printer “organs”, so the process of drawing pages I’ve been using for the last five years, drawing the pencils digitally with the Cintiq or the iPad and then printing them in light blue to ink it traditionally with my brush, was temporarily put on hold, and I’m back drawing the page only on paper.

I love drawing on paper, don’t get me wrong.

I’m very found of my sketchbooks, and have been clinging to the “sketch for fun” part of my Mondays during my “MoonDay” live videos, but the digital process had some advantages I came to incorporate to my process.

Some times I get too carried away with the complexity of some panels, creating backgrounds and thinking about “camera angles” as if I was Katsuhiro Otomo, Geof Darrow or Frank Quitely. While drawing digitally, it’s so much easier to create a complex scene, be it because you can separate elements in layers (making ii easier to correct), be it because you can activate virtual rulers that help with the complex perspective lines you’re using (it’s so much easier to set distant vanishing points when you don’t have to worry about them falling inside the paper or even inside the drawing table), or because you can change and adjust dimensions or stuff you’ve already drawn instead of erasing it and drawing it again, so for this particular page I was drawing, which contained TWO panels with complex background elements, I drew those panels digitally and, lacking the printing out option, I put my paper on top of the iPad and used it as a light table.

I tried using the big Cintiq, but the screen is too thick and the image appears blurry with the paper on top. The iPad screen is thin enough to keep the drawing close to the paper.

It will take at least another week to get the printer fixed, so I’ll be drawing entirely on paper for the time being.

Or…

… I’ll keep experimenting with digital inking and will transition completely.

Speaking of Darrow

There was a great interview with Geof Darrow over at the Cartoonist Kayfabe channel.

More images

This is one panel sketch from the short story we’re doing. Even without the balloons, this was the only spoiler-free image I could put in here. We already did the layouts for all the pages, sent them in and got the green light.

We’re looking for something different for this story.

Let’s see how it turns out.

The Last Stroke

To finish this week’s leet out, here are some scans of brush strokes. The analog part of my digital experimentations with digital inking. I was talking with Grampá over the weekend about building digital brushes, let’s see how that goes.

I wonder how many artists working digitally build their own digital brushes.

Be safe. Be kind. Be curious
Pa-ZOW!

Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
September 20th, 2021