9 Panel Grid

How fine a line can you get away with using a 9 panel grid?

I'm in the midst of a challenging SF story in which I'm using the grid and almost every panel is packed with activity. I worked up this test panel as a style test and I kept questioning how thin I could go with the inks. I used a stiff Japanese nib (a zebra I think) and a 0.1 Micron.

Working "half up" is certainly essential for the amount of detail I'm going for, however it adds to the difficulty of knowing whether the lines will be too thin when shrunk back down. I printed this off at actual size and it felt pretty good. However, it's kind of hard judging it alone, without 8 other panels surrounding it.

I was reading here about how Moebius was facing the same issues when he dipped his toe into American Comics with Silver Surfer. His thin lines would often completely disappear - granted, printing reproduction has come a long way since the 80's. Perhaps I should be more concerned wiht how it will look on an iPad.

Inking struggles

These past couple weeks I've jumped into inking the two new stories I've been working on. Here is a list of my concerns so far:

1. Graphic Design - Within each panel and for the page overall. Keeping the shapes interesting, contrasting, and clear is a real tough battle. I've been experimenting in photoshop with the pencil tool, as it allows me to test out a whole bunch of different relationships between light and dark - also it's easier to work white over black.

2. The tools - I spent a good portion of one session struggling to get my tools working right. My ink had gone watery and I couldn't get a line out of my crow quill without dipping it in water constantly. When the tools don't feel right it's very difficult to concentrate on the lines I want to put down.

3. Vision - I kept leaping into panels without a solid vision of what I wanted them too look like. It's hard to be satisfied when you don't really know what you want.

4. Time - I've already spent hours on these pages and I can't help but feel anxious to see them finished. Also, working in the morning means I always have a deadline , so the ticking clock can stress me out.

5. Inking for color - I find it hard to know what too leave for the coloring stage and what needs to be present in the black and white art. I'd like to try a purely black and white comic soon - and see how I fair without the security blanket color provides.

Oh, the Horror - Title Design 2

I refined the rough title treatment. I tried my best to keep an eye on spacing and character weights and all that important typographic stuff, but sure enough some issues arose. I decided I'd do the drop shadow for "Oh, the" in photoshop as getting it dead on was a major pain. I liked the treatment for "Horror" but I felt the character weights were too inconsistent.

The end result:

Oh, the Horror - Title Design 1

For my EC Comics Homage I wanted to try my hand at some hand-lettered type. So I cracked out the graphing paper and found a bunch of reference for the title. Here are a few things I looked at. First up, title cards from Batman the Animated Series.

I also looked at some older horror movie titles.

And of course I had a good look at the EC titles themselves

Oh, the Horror - Pencils and Perspective

The big struggle with this image was figuring out the perspective. It's a 3-point perspective image and I used the shortcut described on James Gurney's blog to get my grid in place. This method keeps you from having to keep track of vanishing points that are way off your canvas.

*Note to anyone using this trick - If you are curious how to fill in the holes left in your grid (see this image), just temporarily extend your markings up or down off your canvas using a piece of scrap paper, mark off those missing lines and you're in business. Thanks to Mr. Gurney for clarifying that for me.

Oh, the Horror - Thumbnail

This is a thumbnail for a fake EC Comics style cover. I used the storyteller app to randomly get an idea for a morality tale typical of EC. The theme "Beggars can't be choosers" captured my imagination and I started with these sketches.