Gatillos

Well it's been a few weeks without updates. I actually have a few pages almost finished, this time I just wanted to try to make sure they are a bit more coherent. Not sure if it will work, of course...

I'm having a bit of a conundrum here, well I would if I knew what the word conundrum actually means. Thing is, I've tried color with some very nice results but most of the time it doesn't feel right. I feel I really need to set on a small palette, maybe grays or shades of blue or something. For the time being I decided I'm going a bit back and using shades applied in Inkscape and pencil shading.

I'll continue practicing with watercolors to see where I can apply them safely.

Take a look at this:

Here, I had a lot of fun drawing it with the graphite pencil. Then I applied some ink as usual. After that I would normally just remove all pencil, either erasing or on the computer, but I figured I could try to take advantage of it and keep some shades of gray which give it a very nice look. Considering it's supposed to be part of a kind-of-gloomy scene, it feels right.

Above you can see the original pencil&ink work, quite draft. I scanned it and then removed pencil via Levels (2nd image), then added a kind of sepia background and some shading for the final image. It still needs a bit more work, a bit more shading but you get the idea.

Finally, above you can see yet another twist on the style. It's a pencil image, which as I've mentioned I enjoy drawing, to which I added a bit of ink (just a bit), and then scanned. On top of it I layered the basic sepia/brown colors you can see. It's simple and very fast, which is a bonus to lazy people like me.

Anyway, I'm going to update the last comic page I posted in LIFE/interior because I didn't like the color. I'll just remove some color. It might show up in your Feed reader, sorry about that. The next page is coming shortly after that.

Oh, the meaningful conclusion is this: I want to do what I enjoy the most, and that seems to be more about pencil and real paper than computers and watercolor, so far. Both using the computer and watercolor have a big drawback: they need a 'setup', kind of a chair space, sitting in a specific place, etc., while drawing panels with a pencil can be done almost anywhere.