k so lately my room has been looking like this when I draw
sometimes I feel excited and overwhelmed about the books I bought (I bought a lot of highly recommended self-teach art books after researching on REDDIT) and im like oh my god just I just need to draw something simple right now. I wanna cartoon so I was like fuck it lets cartoon lets do anything BUT real life studies or read because gsgjgf
I was like holy mother of shit this is peak. zomg I feel like a cartoonist just owning the materials listed in art diaries 4
so the actual goal with traditional cartooning is trying to get a feel for the process for my favorite artists like Prohias and try and get in their headspace by studying and trying to replicate their style. this was my first time inking or using a Lightbox since like fucking middle school. so I was excited
I learned shit right away
so things (im a beginner this may change as I go on in the future)
ink/generally draw from the upper left to bottom right of the canvas to avoid smudging. have a tiny container of water to ever so slightly dilute the ink/waken the brush you hardly need any.
wear a light color shirt to tell if you have ink on your clothes, god forbid you wear black and throw ink in the wash on accident
ink on top of a washrag dont waste napkins like I first did
the more ink you have on the sable brush the thicker the lines will be.
if the brush frays at the edges dont fucking panic. the brush is not fucking ruined its fucking fine. the number 1 mistake I was making was dunking the entire brush on accident, only dunk the brush in ink about halfway over the bristles. and dunk frequently. if the brush is seriously fraying just rinse it in warm water clean it with some dish soap and reshape it. I found that the first time I used the brush, it was seriously fraying. then the next day it was fraying way less/not at all and I was able to keep my lines clean as long as I dunked it frequently.
oh my god if youre hunching imagine hunching and leaning over to your left every 10 seconds im seriously concerned for my posture when im inking.
give ink at least 5 hours to dry before adding white gel pen details/corrections
it's better to use erasable color pencils than 2h pencil for sketching
erasing the sketch under the ink will cause the ink to fade a little
big confident strokes are important, unsure/shy strokes will make wobbly lineart
you need an eye for them little tiny hairs that will shed on the sable brush cause if it catches ink its gonna dot the canvas
thinking of the brush as just using a brush in photoshop with pressure sensitivity helps
the way you hold the brush matters. it matters so much. for finest lines use the tip of the brush, the rest... you just have to try it and learn it yourself. I wouldn't call inking super fun, more like relaxing, it took a lot of concentration. but it got easier for me the more drawings I inked so I'm hopeful I can develop my skills more.
I really like how clean and smooth it looks. I can see myself inking on the go somewhere but oh my god like it kills my back because I am fucking absorbed into the paper it's a very careful craft
day 2 I was like fuck it let's see if I can professionally ink one of my comics
I learned I need whiteout. and it was way too fucking small so I was like okay um how bout I try seeing if I'm able to get more control with the brush and draw in my style to see where I'm at with learning how to maneuver it
this was pretty cool. I feel like all I can say is "its pretty cool" because honestly I have no idea what the fuck im doing I cant even lie but I trust that the more I practice I will pick up more and more knowledge to the point where I can professionally ink one day. god I hope so
I wanted to duplicate the 1st drawing so I grabbed a piece of sketch paper to trace it. after I traced it I traced it AGAIN beside the 1st drawing on bristol. this helped me compare consistency. it seems ok to me. but I wanted more practice. so I went to see if I could make clean ink drawings of previous traditional sketches
because I drew on both sides of one piece of sketch paper im not able to trace it. thats when I came up with the workaround of taking a photo of a sketch, printing it, and then tracing that. but my printer and scanner are having technical issues :) so I went with these
I tested inking over erasable color pencil and 2h pencil. the plan is to edit the final inked images and see if I can somehow digitally erase the sketch layer. I didn't get around to that quite yet. I also want to try filling in large portions of negative space with black using photoshop and other tricks. these little hacks feel like cheating to me I feel kind of guilty. I want to really know and try to understand how cartoonists for newspapers made their artwork without any techno gizmo help, just pure human willpower and know-how. im trying so hard to teach myself.
starting from the upper left of the canvas oh my god I had shy lines. I inked so slow. I feel like it diminished the lineart, plus, im unsure about line weight usage here. so I tried more confident lines and having intentional line weight placement in the next drawings
one thing I really found helpful is that tracing forces you to clean up. it's important that your sketch have as little detail as possible. so you can add the detail during the fucking lineart, the final stage. so, minimizing the sketch, very important..
im trusting that learning how to ink traditionally will help with my dexterity and accuracy or whatever because I won't have constant redos like in photoshop. im trusting my muscles will actually learn something because the stakes are higher, there are no do-overs with errors.
it wasn't that fun to do this because it reveals a lot of the areas I need improvement. but that's part of the goal, to target the weak spots to realize what needs improving. so it's helpful. art isn't always fun but trying will always help you improve.
