I enjoyed that wax-vs-watercolor art in elementary school, too. In college, we worked a little on what’s called ‘Scratchboard’. It’s great. Slick black surface, and when you give it a good scratch with a sharp object (I had a lot of Airbrush parts, and the fat needle that runs up the middle of the typical airbrush was great for it. Also, some kind of “Ninja” dart thingy I was given. Probably terrible for silent assassins to throw, but great for scratchboard) you got a clean white mark that you could taper by applying varying pressure or tilting your scratch tool a bit. wonderful crosshatching opportunities. Try it if you get a chance, but remember, you WILL be drawing “negative”- white on black. You can color it when the drawing is finished.
I did it a couple of different ways. ATGMer is right that the sketches were mostly normal, but very loose. In your head, you have to keep the thought that you’re going to be filling everything in. The ones from this week were inked in with a small pen to help me decide where things would land, then I used a marker to fill in the dark. I piddled around for a panel or two by drawing just the light stuff, then after the strip was scanned, selecting everything but the word balloons in each panel and inverting it. That works okay, too. It does mean that, in the original art, Eddie’s eyes are big black discs with white dots in them. Creepy. Anyhow, this story arc was fun to draw. It took longer than I thought it would to do, though. And it was up to Colorist Frank to decide how to handle the fills. Regular colors is good! I thought he might do some kind of moonlight blue everywhere.
We write in cursive so there’s fewer opportunities for our quill pens to blot as we write. If you torture the letterforms into a single line, you don’t have to lift your pen and risk the blotting so often.
Be wary. People probably made fun of Basketball when it was first showcased. “So… they run around and throw a ball at a peach basket? How do they call that a sport?”
I enjoyed that wax-vs-watercolor art in elementary school, too. In college, we worked a little on what’s called ‘Scratchboard’. It’s great. Slick black surface, and when you give it a good scratch with a sharp object (I had a lot of Airbrush parts, and the fat needle that runs up the middle of the typical airbrush was great for it. Also, some kind of “Ninja” dart thingy I was given. Probably terrible for silent assassins to throw, but great for scratchboard) you got a clean white mark that you could taper by applying varying pressure or tilting your scratch tool a bit. wonderful crosshatching opportunities. Try it if you get a chance, but remember, you WILL be drawing “negative”- white on black. You can color it when the drawing is finished.