I’ve hit my stride in the workflow. I really want to get a set of good Japanese dip pens (the G and Maru pens, in particular) for inking, and try them out. Right now I’m inking with Micron Pigma .005 and .01 black felt-tip pens from Sakura. They’re a great disposable felt-tip for inking, especially as you can get a good variety of line weights from them once they’re broken in. Unfortunately the breaking-in process also wears them out faster as the varying pressure damages the nib.

Tonight’s update is sort of a double update - I realized that there was a bit of dialogue I forgot to include in last week’s update, so I added it in. Also, you may notice some things.

First, I’ve stopped trying to do dialogue in MS, and I’m now doing it (both type and speech balloons) in Photoshop. Much better, and I get the ability to actually exercise some typographic control now, which was sorely needed. The faux bold and faux italic faces and the faster text editor interface in PS are, collectively, a godsend.

Second…everything’s sepiatoned! I decided that I didn’t like the colder grays I was getting, so I decided to aim more for a “french grey” or sepia tone. I’m elated with the results and you can probably expect that all further updates will be in sepiatone unless I can start doing them in color. ^_^

Third, the line quality has gone up. This is in part due to switching to physical inking (pens on paper, yay!) instead of digital. Partly it’s because I’m getting back into old inking habits…haven’t had to ink in years with a pen. Partly it’s also because I’m doing each panel or set of panels (about 1/3 page) as a separate sheet. This spreads my inking work across three or four printed sheets, and increases the size of each frame on the page. This gives me finer ink lines without having to resort to even smaller pens (if such things even exist).

I hope you’re all as happy with the current look as I am. Take care, everybody!

-Wes