The following technical information may not be interesting to everybody and it only proves that I don’t know what I’m doing so I should probably urge you not to read it.

Anyway, I mentioned last week that I was going to alter my process once again with this page and I think it has worked out pretty well. What I have been doing for the previous 75 pages is sketch the layout somewhat lightly right onto my Bristol paper. Then I would ink directly over the pencils and erase them later (I have an old aversion to non-repro blue pencils because of the lack of grab of the point and the inability to erase so I never use them but I know they would solve my problem somewhat). My reason for working this way was to try to be as efficient as possible with my time.

I’m not sure why this only seemed to become a problem in the last couple of pages but I recently noticed after I scanned the inked pages in that there was a lot of feathered and bleeding edges to my lines. I guess this was due to the fact that I was slowly destroying the paper in very subtle ways by penciling and erasing before I laid down the inks. I had to spend a lot of time in Photoshop cleaning this up and I got fed up with it on page 75.

So, my new process is to draw the rough pencils on a separate piece of paper and then use a lightbox to “trace” the pencils in inks on the Bristol paper. I decided to also add a new step in between this. Scan the pencils in and do some correction in Photoshop to iron out some bad anatomy or perspective (in the case of this page just anatomy since I didn’t draw one background here). This is something I would tend to do after I’ve scanned in the inks. Since I don’t do enough of the old trick of using a mirror to look at my pencils in reverse I was missing a lot of warped angles and faces until I saw them on the screen. So, I print that out and that’s what I use as my guide to lightbox.

It went pretty well with this page and I hope that the added time on the front end continues to save time in the back end (Photoshop cleanup). We shall see.