Daniel Picci

Daniel Picci is a guy whose art I have admiring on Digital Webbing. When I saw this piece I asked if I could have a go at it and he was kind enough to say yes. It was just do iconic and clean that I just had to put ink to it. I'm pretty happy with the results overall. The only thing that catches my eye is the energy crackle in the background is a little thick. I did this thinking about the page being colored and there would some sort of cool color hold on the4 energy crackle so I wanted to give the colorist a thick enough line to play with. I would love to work on some more of Mr Piccis pencils. Who know what the future will bring.

Leinil Francis Yu

I absolutely love working over Leinil Francis Yu. Especialy when he does all the grey toning with the pencils and leaves a sketchy look. This really makes me think and make decisions I normaly would not be forced to make with solid line art penciling. What do I accent? What do I push into the black? Should I use crosshatching or line proximity to achieve the gradients? How dirty or clean should I keep it? I love haveing to ask these questions and more so, I love coming up with the answers. You really have to interpret the pencils and try to bring out what the penciler intended so anyone can look at the paice and still know who penciled it. If I did my job right, nobody will ever know I touched the page. All will think the penciler inked it himself because it looks like what he would do if they would or sometimes, could do, if they inked it themselves.

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.