The most soul-crushing part of analog inks is that point after scanning originals where you have to decide exactly how far to push the blacks when adjusting curves and balancing levels. Just how BLACK do I really want this? Especially with a 3-color limited palette? 😭

Been inking again and finally got fed up with the crappy whiteout pens I was using, so went to my local Jerry's and picked up a variety to finally sit down and test out, and there really was only 1 clear winner: The bullet-tip 7mm Uni Posca. Freaking LOVE IT.

I would have made a terrible animator lol. Thank goodness I'm not. 😅

Slowly finding this character for COMICS ARE MAGIC. She loves hanging out in odd panels and getting lost in a great graphic novel (though she'll take the occasional floppy and loves her minis too.

Sat down and wrote out the page-by-page outline for that how-to-make-comics for beginners book I've been threating to make for years, then I went and doodled a thing. Let's just say it's got loads of printables and worksheets, and I'm having way too much fun figuring it all out. 😆

Plants done. Woo. Getting a sense of depth and feeling hidden below the flowers and leaves instead of above (most reference of lotuses is from above, so I def had to use my spacial powers to imagine some of this one) was tricky. Now people, water, and reflections. Reclining poses are hard for me.😑

Drawing very large dreamy (literally) lotuses today. If I haven't been around, I've been taking a social media break because the world out there has been...so overwhelming. Still reading the news and keeping up to date, but letting it in a little less so I don't have a complete mental breakdown.

Sooooo...still a little wonky but definitely BETTER. At least when you export and embed as CMYK it stays true-to-color, but exporting CMYK as RGB is a disaster, meaning if you're explorting print-for-web, you will still have to use a secondary program to convert CMYK files to sRGB for consistency.

CSP just dropped a new version update, and this alone may be worth finally upgrading for me. The lack of embedded color profiles and the inability to select the exact color within a preview profile has been the bane of anything I have EVER colored in CSP, and the workarounds were an epic pain.

YA GN haul from my favorite bookstore: Books of Wonder in NYC which I love to itty bitty bitty pieces. There is something about children's bookstores that is always especially magical. Y'all can keep The Strand. I'll take BoW anyday. 💖

SO GLAD to finally be done with the 100-some-odd pages of large-group and crowd pages I saved for doing clean-pencils until the very end. Honestly, it's been a slog. It's hard keeping track of character designs across a large group, plus complicated round-table/campfire compositions.

Artists, show your range. (I think my range is more in subject matter than style honestly)

London: still one of my favorite characters from Five Wishes. It continues to makes me sad he only gets a few bit parts, but I tried to make the few lines he gets worth it. >_<

Was rewatching Pulp Fiction last night, and totally just realized that this line from Trollhunters is totaly a PF reference. It's a running gag that the main character in TH has terrible Spanish (while his girlfriend is fluent), especially in this scene where he throws in some French to boot.

like this:

Yet another spread that took longer than it probably should have, but I'm not exactly an expert at drawing wet, recently burnt-out buildings in semi-piney terrain. Reference only goes so far, y'all. It only goes so far... 😑 I finally get to sleep now. Hoo-ray. 😤

And here I thought I had really crappy color memory. >_> (bombed it the first time btw. The second time is much easier.)

Working on one of my hardest/biggest crowd scenes and thinking about the natural disasters I've lived through and how disasters tend to bring about the best--rather than the worst--in most people living through them, even while we cope with those disasters in so many different ways.

Thinking about that Frieren meme as I work on this panel. Took me ages to figure out how the hell I wanted to draw the characters in this book looking up. Which they do. A LOT.

With ❤️ from central Connecticut.

I love how sometimes, noticing some tiny little thing can bring so much delight...like noticing how the doorways in the main character's house from Trollhunters are all extra EXTRA wide because whomever did the set design for this series probably realized...

Inky inksis inky inks. Kiddo went to bed, it's a holiday, and I finally get to ink. /dances the inky inky dance/ Weird things bring me joy.

Every time I start inking something, I end up getting a lot of curiosity about the tools that I use because I don't use traditional pen/ink/brush/pen comics tools--I use oil pencils/leads which I've actually never seen other cartoonists use before. (1/7)

I have noticed a few friends struggling with getting their scripts out faster, so I wanted to share one of the ways I get a script out FAST without overthinking it, then go back and tweak and tighten later: (1/10)

The look of a furbaby who desperately wants to go to bed but WILL NOT go to bed until mama does too. (she won't even go up the stairs unless I'm there right behind her. Ya big baby.) 😄

This is what an occupation looks like, and it is BARELY in the mainstream news media here in the US. And this is just in ONE. DAY. WE. ARE. NOT. AFRAID. I refuse to be intimidated by this government backed Icestapo. I REFUSE TO BE AFRAID.

I can work with this. Five Wishes is going to be 3-color pantone so this is just the blacks (which will be a very dark purple). This week, I'll be making shading and textures to scan and use digitally so I'm not toning every page by hand, which is pretty time intense!

TANG. 😆

Inking geniuses question: does anybody have any tips or resources for how to ink leather? With highlights! One of my characters wears a black leather jacket, and I already screwed it up once. Manga characters who wear black leather would be useful as well. Having a hard time even finding examples🥲

One of the things I love working with oil pencils and a toothy paper instead of ink on bristol are the textures I can get that you can't get with ink even using dry brush: like that special swirling texture of dark brown tightly curled textured hair.