Greg Land

Greg Land has a the perfect marriage of grey scale pencil rendering and inker friendly line art that has become the standard in comic books today. So when approaching this page as an inker I needed to decide how far I wanted to goo in either direction and how to achieve the grey toning effects. I decided to go with a technique often used by one of my favorite inkers, Mike Perkins. He utilizes a few different colored pencils to achieve texture, blackness and how "greasy" the pencils is. Though I make claims of being as skilled as he when doing this. I ended up up using a Faber Castell Schwartz Black pencil. This pencil has a slight grease feel to it but does not smear to the touch and glides over the smooth Bristol that I use fairly well, resulting in what I think is some pretty cool smoke effects.

Stephen Platt

The pencils on this were done by the amazing Stephen Platt. I loved this one because it definitely put me back in my comfort zone of crosshatching and tons of line work. After finishing though, I was able to identify a weak spot in my inking and it seems to run throughout all of my work. Shiny, reflective surfaces. I tend to want to render these surfaces the same way I would anythin else. When looking at the shield right next to the leg and torso, this little tidbit really jumped out at me. This is a good thing. Now that I have identified the weakness, I can rectify this bad habit and avoid it in the future. I decided to go with an almost dead weight contour line on The Fighting American himself since her is not in actual perspective or spatial proportion to the background figures. I think it gives it a little more of a graphic art kind of feel. All in all, I am very happy with the way this turned out and will use S.Platt for practice inks again in the near future.

Lienil Francis Yu

I've been sitting on this one for a while. I was pretty intimidated by the pencil because they are not really "inker freindly" pencils. Lots of grey tones and half shading without defined lines. I finaly felt I am in a place in my developement where I can find the intended solid line in the grey. Leinil has a great sense of  balance between superhero and everyday qualities in his characters. I had to fight to keep that feel while hardening the lines, which was a challenge but I feel it came together nicely.

Patrick Zircher

This is another one of those pages I worked on when I couldn't sleep. Although, I only spent about a week on this one. This page gave me a chance to work on some slick, sleek line work. The page was a lot of fun. I'd like find some more of Paticks pencils to practice on in the future.

Vitor

I worked on this one off and on when I could not sleep. Something nice and relaxing. I'm pretty happy with the results overall. I do my best when I lose myself in a page and find my groove but I only spent ten minutes here and fifteen minutes there, which I think made the page feel a little disjointed in spots.

Gregg Paulson

I just finished inking issue 4 of Judo Girl which is being released by Bluewater Productions. Here are a few of the pages from that book which were pencilled by the funktastic Gregg Paulson and inked by me. This was my first time working on this big open style and it took me a few pages to find the groove. I experimented with a few different tools to try and find the right fit and I settled on the brush. It just gave me that fluid and wet feel I think the pencils were just screaming for. This issue was a ton of fun. So much in fact, that Gregg and I will be teaming up for another four issues of comic book goodness in the form of "Orion" to be released by Bluewater Productions as well.

Jose Luis

I was commissioned to ink these covers and they were the most challenging and rewarding pages I have ever worked on. Jose really packs the detail in and makes you dig deep as an inker to give all that you have and more.