Jim Lee

 I was working on a project with a tight deadline and lots personal changes happening in my life. It felt like every line I was laying down on anything was forced. I needed to get back on track.

I came across this Rogue pic while searching for inspiration and was instantly transported to a time in my youth when my heroes were the characters in the comics I was reading and not the creators. This felt good.

So I took a few hours to  break from my tight deadlines and go back in time. While I was inking this I was on total auto pilot and I don't think I made a single concious decision on it. Before I knew it, 3 hours had passed and I was staring at a fully inked page.

I know I am no Scott Williams but I am pretty happy with the way this turned out. I managed to keep Rogue in that statuesqe, iconic, larger than life kind of light. The Dinosaur kind falls into the waterfall and cliff. I'm not sure how to fix that but it presents a new challenge for me to overcome another day.

Joe Maduriera

A buddy of mine is a huge Joe Mad fan and was never really attractedto his work. One day he showed me this two page spread and I knew I had to go for it. It's a pretty busy page so I figured I would tackle it in planes. Closest to farthest. Twenty minutes in, I knew this approach would not work It's such a busy page and the Tiny Wasp all big and in front of Thor really played with my head. Usualy the figure or mass that is closest is the largest mass and would therefore get the thickest lines and variations. Not so here. I needed to make sure the Wasp still looked small, just very close to the camera. Which made me go somewhere I am not comfortabele. The wonderful world of halos.

I am not a fan of halos but like any other device an inker can use on a page, it has it's place and purpose. This was truly my first time experimenting with this technique and am still trying to find it's proper use. I think it was a successful beginning.

Then I the was all the different textures I was able to play with. Giving bricks, leather and sentient symbiotic space goo all need look like different surfaces. This area is one of my favorite playgrounds. To me,this is where you can make a page come to life. Making all the surfaces look anfeel real gives the page an anchor in reality and allows the reader to suspend disbelief and accept that a giant Venom monster is crashing through a wall chasing a thunder god.

Jose Luis

This is a series of character studies I was commissioned to ink by Morgan Bramlet. They were penciled by an amazing penciler named Jose Luis who is currently doing some work for DC. These were some of the most fun pieces I have ever worked on. Jose has an amazing eye for detail and I didn't want to lose an ounce of it. His pencils really challenge me to do my best and then push beyond my best. Just a quick note, The backgrounds were left out of the inked version upon Morgans request. This would allow for a cleaner figure that could be cut and pasted later for promo use.

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.