Pen Play.

Something else I worked on last week while I was laying low was testing out my new markers. I bought some for sketchbook work, but soon found myself wanting to try them out on a finished piece of artwork. With Sushi-Girl And Friend, I always feel I cocked up the inking stage a bit. I think my inking has come into its own in the last couple of years, but here, it maybe got away from me a little. Which is a shame, as the design and concept has maybe been one of my favourite to date. I think I may have been breaking-in new brushes and dip-pen on this image, which I always find is the kiss-of-death. So I’ve always wanted to see what it would look like coloured. If I can’t go back in time and un-fudge the inking (I’ve even thought about redrawing the whole image and doing it again a couple of times), I’d at least like to see it in glorious colour. Bad ink job aside, I do like the monster design and more-or-less how it turned out. So when it came to picking an image to colour, it had to be this one. It’s a shame hardly anyone uses markers in comics anymore, as I had a blast doing it. That said, one massive draw back is once you’ve put a colour down, you’re stuck with it. Also, it’s brilliant to colour by hand and feels a lot better then colouring on computer, but takes a lot longer with markers, and doing large areas is tough going. Plus you can only use the colours you own, whereas on a computer, it’s any colour you want.

There’s also some water colour pencils and fluorescence pens going on in the mix. I thought I might scan it in and colour the background on computer, but after playing around for an hour or two with it, I just couldn’t get the balance right and it always looked a bit off, no matter what I tried. So I’ll post it CG free. I was going to paint in the background with water colour paint, but it’s just normal printer paper and would go all horrible. I didn’t really have a back up plan when the computer colouring didn’t pan out.

I’m fairly happy with bits of it, and plan to try and master the marker. For my first real try, I thought there was some nice stuff going on. At one scary point I thought I’d messed up the mouth, which I had left till last and would have meant all the time colouring the rest first was for nothing. But thankfully, I think I managed to pull it back to looking half-decent at least.