Practice makes... better

Lately I've been really working hard to get my inking and coloring to a higher or at least to a different level. To broaden the scope and become more of an all rounder. I have been inking sketches that I found on the web, by among others, Jack Kirby. Just to have something to ink. But I figures since I'm never going to be part of a comic book producing machine like the people who used to ink his work and I will always be inking my own work, it was an utterly pointless (though interesting) exercise. In order to develope my own style of inking I needed to ink my own pencils. So I did.
I took a sketch I posted in my last blog entry, but here it is again....


So I inked it. I did a light blue print out of it and inked on top of that.
I wasn't too unhappy with the result, although I think I overdid the details slightly. I'm trying to find a better balance between rough and undetailed parts and detailed more rendered part of the drawing. But I always get sort of caught up in the fun of putting ink to paper with a brush, which result in the whole thing being too detailed and loses all tension within it... Does that makes sense? It needs a contrast between rendered and less-rendered bits, so that certain parts jump out more and get more emphasis. That's important...
Anyway te ink:


So as I said, the inks had room for improvement, but it was a nice little exercise. So I thought what the hell, let's follow through with some more photoshop practice. I love the way photoshop let's you make the illustration look sexy...


I'm thinking of maybe adding some type, but I don't know what yet.

If there are any inkers/draftsmen/colorererers out there that have any points for me, please let me know. I've been a professional illustrator and designer for about 10 years now, but I still have plenty to learn and not afraid to do so. So if you have any thoughts on this stuff, it'd be cool to hear from you....

Doodles

Not much to post but a bunch of sketches.
Some inked, some not, some halfway.
Enjoy...

Mighty Thor

Some time ago I came across this Flickr page (through a post on Coop's blog) onwhich several artists, both amateur and proffesional had posted their own inkings of Jack Kirby's pencils of a page out of the number 144 issue of Thor.
Never having inked some-one else's pencils befire, I intended to join in and add my own but due to other deadlines and the like I didn't get to it for weeks. Untill yesterday...
On my way to my studio (on the other side of town) the weather changed from beautifull to crappy (as it has done every morning for all of this summer so far). Thunder and lightning were in the sky. I caught a couple of bolts out of the corner of my eye and scanning the skies for more fireworks I hadn't noticed a little post in the middle (!!!) of the road in time. So I crashed right into it, going over the bars,bending the fork and left pedal of my bike, cutting my hand and hitting my knee hard.... idiot.
Anyway since the god of thunder had distracted me that much I decided I let him destract me some more so I inked a panel from the page.... bla bla bla here it is.

The original pencils (just the last panel)...


Aaaand the inks...


I want to do the rest of the page aswell so as soon as that's done, it'll be blogged on.

Hitching the wagon

In august I'm getting married which is fun. But what's even better is I get to design my invitations! (only kidding, honey).
Since my lovely girlfriend soon to be wife is from South Korea and I'm still buzzing from the trip we took there in May I decided to go with Korean feel.

In South Korea almost everything looks beautiful and grubby at the same time. And in some way the beauty and the grubbyness seem to compliment each other wonderfully. So not phased by the fact that in Korea this came about over a few hundred years, I set upon trying to achieve the same feel in the invitation.

Since the Korean manga industrie is renowned for ripping off the Japanese manga classics, I decided to do the same... And since I bought a dvd boxset of AstroBoy in Soul the choice of which classic to rip off was easely made.

So First I started to sketch out the characters...


Then came the type. Based on some AstroBoy artwork from the 70' (i think) I did the main lettering of the word "Trouwen" in Illustrator. No handdrawn sketches because it's such a straight/blocky style.
For all the remaing typography I used Bullet Smallcaps from the House Industries font library, and quite heavily tweeked it using the 'skew' and 'free transform' features in Illustrator (yeah I went no holds barred on this one).


The next step was to dump it all in photoshop, color it all, add some cutesy robot characters, Korean type and some of that all important grubbyness. The latter mainly consisted of the 'pixelate > color halftone' effect and switching all the layer blending modes to 'multiply' and putting it all to the background of a scanned in piece of cardboard. Et voilá, c'est la belle grub.