Hopelessly Lost, But Making Good Time #64

By Pam Bliss
August 1, 2006

Hello, and welcome back to "Hopelessly Lost ... ," the series about making your own comics for people who aren't afraid to get ink all over themselves, and a variety of household surfaces, and those who enjoy looking at the parts that end up on the paper. It's time to return to last installment's discussion of various random topics connected with the art and science of comics inking.

Learning from Unconventional Sources

A lot of inkers make the mistake of looking only to the work of other comics inkers for inspiration and advice. There's no question that this is a valuable technique, and there are some little tricks of the trade you can't learn anywhere else. But there are plenty of other people out there whose work holds potentially crucial keys to putting black on bristol.

What is comics inking, at its simplest and most essential level? It's making lines, almost always using a pulling motion, with a brush, pen, marker or other tool. There are other kinds of artists whose work depends on a similar combination of task, motion, and tools, and it can be very profitable to study their techniques for achieving practical goals that are similar to our own.

I know I've learned an awful lot from automotive pinstripers. For those of you who may not be car buffs, pinstripes are not those dreadful tape things applied to innocent cars, often by semi-trained dealership workers, in the manner of someone putting contact paper on kitchen shelves. Real pinstripes are hand painted directly onto the fenders and other body panels by real painters using real paint and real brushes—long bristled, natural fiber, round brushes called, logically enough, "liners." Sometimes masking tape is used to define the work, but many good pinstripers work freehand. Like all of the most impressive sights in nature, watching a pinstriper run a single freehand line, perfectly straight, the length of a fender, then refill his brush and pick up exactly where he left off, is a sight that fills the observer with awe and humility. And, like all human displays of skill and courage, it fills someone who has the same skill, but at a lower level, with ambition and a desire to learn.

If you're lucky enough to have a custom auto paint shop in your neighborhood, ask if you can meet the pinstriper and see if he will agree to let you observe. (Heck, if you have a car you like and few spare bucks, wipe off that tape and have a simple striping job done. Nothing looks sharper.) Another place to see stripers at work is at custom car, street rod and hot rod shows. The bigger shows will usually have several stripers exhibiting, and often they will bring a car along to work on during the show. Add this to the many cars on display that are heavily striped, and the general coolness and creativity displayed by the car designers and painters, and you have an outing that would please any cartoonist. Even small local car shows at fairgrounds and similar venues will sometimes have a local pinstriper plying his trade under a tent or out in the hot sun. I don't know how they do it.

Finally, if you can't bear the thought of going to a car show, or live away from centers of car culture, there is always television. American Chopper, on the Discovery Channel, in addition to its standby subjects of welding and arguing, often features the work of master painter Nubby, who is a joy to watch as he pinstriped and tapes up flames, all freehand.

Calligraphy is another art form that has a lot to teach cartoonists. Calligraphers set up their pages with pencilled understructures, use similar inks and a variety of a tools that overlap the ones used by comics inkers, and are constantly exploring ways to make longer, smoother lines in a variety of weights. Transitions between lines of widely varying weights are terribly important in calligraphy, and these transitions often are the cause of problems in comics inking. Emulating calligraphers as they change the angles of their tools and adjust the pressure they apply to the paper can solve a lot of fiddling little problems and avoid those little blots and pools where two lines meet.

Finally, calligraphy catalogs are an absolutely vital resource for people who want to ink comics using traditional techniques. With so many small art supply stores going out of business and the limited selection offered by the big box hobby stores, and with so many cartoonists and commercial artists abandoning hand inking for digital media techniques, it is getting more and more difficult for us old schoolers to find supplies. Calligraphy catalogs stock dip pens and nibs, a variety of fountain pens, some of which are gorgeous to draw with, Japanese brush pens that work just as well for inking pages of comics as they do for creating beautiful characters, and a variety of inks of every possible degree of blackness and solubility. Many of these business are very much aware of the cartoonist as a potential customer and will go out of their way to help you select your gear and materials.

Two other fields that I think have potential for cartoonists to explore are sign painting and Japanese and Chinese brush painting. Everything I know about sign painting I learned from the wonderful collection Sign Game by cartoonist/sign painter Justin Green, but I found that book very inspirational. I've also used sumi inks and brushes experimentally. I like the inks, although I find that they dry slowly on Bristol and some don't hold up well to an eraser, but I found the brushes a bit too soft for my taste. I'd like to learn more about both these forms, and plan to study them in more detail at some vague far future time when I am not buried in deadlines.

Waving the White Flag

If there's one nonexistent thing any artist who works in black and white would like to have is a set of white ink tools that work as well as the ones we have for black ink. Technology in this area is progressing—there are certainly far more, and better white ink media than there were when I started cartooning seventeen years ago, but we aren't there yet.

Some of the new media, including many of the new white markers, can be excellent for drawing in white on a black ground. This is a very interesting technique that can be difficult to do since so many whites do not cover solid black with sufficient density using a single coat, and drawing the same line over and over spoils the freshness. Some of the new markers are much denser, but while they are much better for drawing over black, many of them can't easily be used for corrections, either because the nibs are too large, or because they dry in such a way that you can't draw over them with most blacks. To add to the problem, experimentation can be difficult, since these tools can be extremely expensive. I can only recommend that you collect coupons, take advantage of sales, and experiment anyway to see if any of the new white pens is a good match for the rest of your toolbox.

The ideal white pen would, I think, be a solvent based, felt tip marker that puts down a dense solid white, the first time, dries quickly on the paper but never dries out in the nib or reservoir (assuming proper use of the cap!), writes on anything, comes in a wide variety of nib shapes and sizes, can be corrected with a variety of tools, and is cheap to buy. In other words, I'm looking for a negative Sharpie, which of course doesn't exists

For me, the search for the white Sharpie is like the search for the white whale: long, difficult, dangerous, and probably symbolic of something.

Next time: more stuff. It's guaranteed to be comics related, but I'm not making any other promises. Until then, go out and make some comics.

Pam Bliss has been making comics since 1989, and the minicomic, in all its infinite variety, is her favorite form. Her cartoon short stories are set in the perfect Midwestern small town, Kekionga, Indiana, where just about anything can happen. Her new ongoing series, KEKIONGA, explores the mysteries of that most mysterious place through the eyes of an innocent young superhero. For more about all the Kekionga stories, visit www.paradisevalleycomics.com. Or, for updates on work in progress, essays on storytelling and other subjects, auto industry comments and random stuff, including a thrilling weekly adventure serial, read Sharkipede's LiveJournal No Silver Cars at http://www.livejournal.com/users/sharkipede/.

Paradise Valley Comics
No Silver Cars
Sparky's Minicomics Tips:
- Part One
- Part Two