Tom Strong Pencil & Ink
Here’s the first page from one of the “Tom Strong” stories which I drew, both the pencil version and the inked final…I’m not an adherent to the current trend of ‘super-tight’ pencilling; I find it contributes to a tendency to trace lines rather than ‘think drawing’ as one inks. So instead, I try to pencil for things like placement, structure, lighting, but only in general terms, leaving some of the final decisions to the actual moment of inking.
I also believe in roughing in the balloons & captions (they’re part of the composition, not just an add-on!) as well as shading in the blacks, instead of placing teensy little “x” marks all over the place as seems to have become the norm amongst penciller types. Personally, as I create the page, I want to estimate the relative weights of the varying masses of black, gauging how each affects the whole as a design, also how each helps or hinders the sense of lighting and drama, and having a lot of little x marks all over the place doesn’t help me do those jobs, it just confuses my eye with more clutter…
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Excellent!
I was a BIG fan of Tom Strong back when this came out. I remember hating it when they had a “guest artist” other than Chris Sprouse, but yours was one of the few that I liked. It had solidity and clarity that drew me into the pages. I think it was the first time I had seen your sequential art actually…
Thanks for posting that pencil page, I love seeing that work.
I dont like using the “x’s” either. I can’t “see” the black in my head, I need to see it on paper, make sure the panel compositions, and page compositions look good. I don’t feel I am saving time by using the x’s.
Thanks a lot Richard! Yes that’s a good word–’clarity’–easily said and hard to achieve on the page…a worthy goal.