Tuesday, June 10, 2003
 
 
 
Version 1.1 :: Plethora of Purple

Ink 0:40 (1:57) [Average, consecutive]

Here's the whole comic thus far. The first thing I ink is the frame borders using the 08 pen (the thickest), because of everything, those (the lines) are the things that really can't be improvised, so if I smudge them out, I'm screwed oO;; Then, I ink the characters. Panel one was inked with the 01 and 005, Panel two was also done with 01 and 005. Because three was closer than one and two, the lines could be thicker without losing much detail, so 02 and 03 was used alongside the others. There's no shots in this comic to illustrate it, but if I have a close-up in which you can see the eyes, I tend to ink the eyelid in the 05. That's really the only time I've used it on the comic thus far ^^; Aside from the panel borders themselves, I finish inking very linear-ly. Ask me not why oO;
One thing I've learned is that the focus of a panel should never have thinner lines than the background. That's why I always use at 01 to at least outline them. Since 005 is my thinnest pen, it's used for the entirety of the background, which is inked after the character is finished (as you can see in the fourth panel).
A little side note: You may notice I have the title and date down on the bottom there. Though that won't show up when I scan it in the final time for the actual comic, I try to always date everything I do. If I had put off inking for a day or so, I'd have to make sure I put both dates down. If it took me a week, I'd have all the dates down there. It's very important (at least for me) to date any sort of artwork I do (and to KEEP everything) because then I can go back and say, "I did this a year ago today, have I improved?" Usually, this is somewhat of an ego-trip (for even if I still hate my art a year from now, I'll hate this stuff even more oO;;), and it does help boost my self-esteem (which needs it sometimes oO;;)

Erase me, baybee! 0:05 (2:04)

Here's our comic. It's all inked and, though there are bits here and there that are screwed up (because I am far from the best inker on the planet), it's fairly decent. This is where I take the clic eraser (God, from earier, as I've told you) and do a very thorough job of erasing ALL the pencil. This doesn't require too much time, since I draw very lightly (especially on the comics), but I'm so very anal about getting rid of ALL the pencil, it takes a bit longer (the gray spots you can see on the scan, by the way, are just from the GIF compression: I'm trying to make these files as small as possible so you can load the page quickly ^^;)

Scanning oO; 0:02 (2:06)

Nothing too special here. This is my scanner window. I scan as 400dpi lineart, which brings it into Photoshop as a BMP file, with just black and white, no shades of gray whatsoever. I scan high because even though I'm going to reduce it later, the Lineart picks up more lines at higher resolutions. I think the part of this step that takes longest is getting the comic to not be crooked on my scanner bed (a very difficult task, at times --;) I'm very lazy about rotating the canvas, so I try to get it straight here (and its helped this time by the fact that my lines are straight ^^;)

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Flow of Destiny is written by Alisha Farnsworth, and illustrated by Alicia Kilpatrick. Flow of Destiny © 2002 Aslua Studios. It is hosted on Keenspace, a free webhosting and site automation service for webcomics.