Image Shadowline artist Rick Ross talks about INKING WITH A BRUSH

agitainment

Hi. Rick Ross here. I'm a comic book artist best known for my work on Image Shadowline's Urban Monsters as well as the stories "U.F.O." and "Iron Harvest" featured in the weekly graphic novel anthology Agitainment.Comics.

At the suggestion of the moderator here in the Comic Production forum, I'm starting a thread to talk about my own experience making comics, and I thought I'd start by discussing inking with a brush.

One of the things I've gotten consistently positive feedback for is my inking, which gave me the idea to write a series of articles about learning how to use a brush to ink comics. You can read those articles here.

(An example of my inking from my current story, "Iron Harvest": )


In this thread I'd like to talk about brush inking, whether it's from feedback to one of my articles, or to answer questions about my approach, or just to talk about inking in general.

I'll be checking in from time to time, so let's talk.

Ex animo!
Rick

Agitainment.Comics
www.agitainment.com/ics

agitainment

Hey, everyone.

This is not intended as a bump but to make clear that this thread is the place to ask questions and post comments about inking comics with a brush (and also for anything relating to any of my articles on the subject, a new update of which you can find here).

So I'm curious to find out: Is there anyone else here who uses a brush regularly on their comic work? If so, how long have you used it?

Ex animo!
Rick

Agitainment.Comics
http://agitainment.com/ics

Fysh

I've been reading your articles over the last couple of days and have found them very interesting so far - I've never yet tried inking with a brush because, while I've seen people make it look easy and I know that the results are fantastic, I've always been put off by the perceived amount of work involved in learning how to do it well. You articles have certainly helped in that regard - I've just finished reading part 4 and will be picking up some materials with which to finally try my hand at brush inking.

Out of curiosity, have you worked with graphics tablets to any great extent? If so, how have you found them in comparison to working with pencil, paper and ink?

agitainment

To your first point, I didn't start inking with a brush until last year because, frankly, I was too intimidated. You're right that there's this huge perceived level of difficulty to it, almost to a cultish extent. You hear about all the masters of comics who inked with a brush (Frazetta, Foster, Sinnott, &c.) and the first time you try doing it yourself it just looks like crap and it's so disheartening.

The truth is, the brush is difficult to MASTER (and I'm nowhere near that level), but it's not as difficult as you might think to get some really good results pretty quickly, better results (I think) than inking with a crow quill.

A lot of it is just making yourself do it, no matter what the results look like at the beginning. And having a goal in mind (like say, doing an actual comic page every week for a website) can be very helpful in this regard.

A lot of the books I've read about inking haven't been very helpful when it came to teaching how to use a brush, and I think this adds to the intimidation factor (the best book I've found thus far is Klaus Jansen's inking book for DC). I mean, if the current experts can't really help, what chance do I, a novice, have?

This is the whole reason I started the articles about brush inking. Not because I'm a master, but because I'm a student too, working hard at it, and I've been able to learn a lot about it in less than a year just by doing it.

As to your last question, I have a Wacom tablet that I use all the time when I work in Photoshop. I know some artists who do their comic inking using one (Brian Bolland, I think), but I personally don't like it as much as ink on paper. Partly this is because of the unusual eye/hand relationship where you're moving your hand down on the tablet but looking up at a screen--that's never felt natural to me, though I imagine with more practice I could get better used to it. But there's also the tactile feel of pencil or brush and paper that I miss.