Making of

First of all, let’s talk about the tools of the trade. I like to do all of my drawings the old-fashioned way (which is to say, no computers involved until I scan them in), so there’s a lot of paper and pencil involved in the process.

Let’s start with the paper, then! Although professional comic books are drawn on thick bristol art boards these days, I work on regular 75g/m² offset paper. Yes, like the kind you buy for your home printer! That’s because I don’t send my originals anywhere. I’m working exclusively for the web, so the originals are ultimately just a way to get the image onto something so that I can scan them into the computer. Still, I keep them all safe over here. They take up a lot of space, but I just can’t bring myself to throw the drawings away! I have tried to work on heavier Canson paper in the past, but I find that the ink doesn’t flow as easily on it. I’ve also tried professional grade art boards (you can buy online them from Blue Line Pro, for example), which are really great but too expensive considering I’ll just keep the originals for myself.

Now, moving on to the rest of the material (Pic. 1). I’ve probably used every kind of pencil, or mechanical “pencil-like thing” you can think of throughout the years. My favorite is this Staedtler 2.0mm mechanical pencil (first one from the left ). I like how it feels a lot like a pencil, but with the advantage of being reusable. I sharpen the tip very very often, which is a bit of a drag, but I like how the darn thing feels so… While I’m working, I like to use a Pentel click-type eraser (second, from the left). I use this because it’s more precise than larger conventional erasers. I still use the big erasers, but only to erase the underlying pencil after the inking is done. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that in just a second! To do the large erasing, I use nothing special. Whatever I have at hand at the time. It doesn’t really matter because those erasers never last more than a month or two. Finally, there are the ink pens. Traditionally, inkers (the guys who cover the pencil drawings with ink, for those of you who don’t already know it) use pens with special tips or paintbrushes to do their inking. Also, they use very dark china ink. I use 0.1 mm Unipin disposable ink pens by Uniball (third from the left). Again, I use these because they are faster to use than china ink. With regular ink, you have to dip your pen into a little pot every few lines, and you have to wait until a section of the drawing dries up before putting your hand over it. Accidents are very common, at least for me! With the Unipin, I can just keep working non-stop. Now, there are a number of effects that you can’t really achieve as easily with this felt-tip pen, but I think the time you gain is worth the tradeoff. Besides, it’s not like I’m an expert inker anyway, like some of the artists I really admire (Scott Williams and Danny Miki come to mind). I suspect those guys wouldn’t be able to stand using these pens…

You may have noticed a number of pens on the picture, many of them having bands of masking tape or scotch tape around them. Those are the pens that are no longer good enough to do line work with. The ink in these Unipins seem to last forever! However, the felt tips only last a little while before they start breaking up. At that point it becomes harder and harder to draw with them. When this happens, I just pull out a new pen and mark the old one up. I continue to use it to fill in large black areas. Since the ink lasts so long, I end up with a very large number of used up pens (I swear I have over 20 of them at the time of this writing) lying around.

OK, so now you know what I use. Now I can show you what I use it for!

The example I’ll be showing you here is from one of the drawings in the Grifter/Zealot gallery that was published a little while back. The first thing I do after I come up with the idea for a gallery, or a comic, is a very rough posing of the characters (Pic. 2). You can call this a glorified stick-figure drawing! The important thing at this stage is just to get the poses and proportions right. I’ve become so used to drawing the human figure that sometimes I don’t even finish this step all the way, and move straight on to the next one. Which brings us to…

The next step is to “beef up” the stick figures, and give them muscular volume (Pic. 3). This is usually when I give the characters their facial features, unless it’s a character that wears a mask or something. That’s why I only marked up the position for Grifter’s eyes, and no nose or mouth. This is also the stage at which I start defining the silhouette of the characters. So, if there is something that really sticks out, I might sketch it in now (If I’m drawing Spawn, for example, I might draw in the spikes, the big heavy boot, pouches, and so on). On this drawing, there was nothing like that… Well, maybe the shoulder protectors from Zealot’s costume, but I decided to put that one in later.

Finally, all that’s left is to finish the drawing up. This is when I draw the costumes, hair, touch up the faces and draw in all of the shadows and textures, like the reflection lines on the metal parts of the costumes (Pic. 4). The finished pencil drawing looks pretty much the same as it’s going to look after it’s inked. I may add a few more details at the inking stage but, for the most part, this is it.

These days, you may find comic books that are not inked. Salvador Larroca’s covers for X-Men, for example, are not. Personally, I don’t really like that look. I could scan the drawing at this point, and manipulate it inside Photoshop to make it look like it has been inked, but there’s too much clean up involved and the final result isn’t all that great either. So, it’s time to pull out my trusty Unipins.

As I’ve said before, I don’t thin of myself as a master inker or anything like that. So, I just cover the pencil up with the pens. I’m a huge fan of artists Adam Hughes and Frank Cho, so I started using thicker lines around the characters, like they do. It also helps to set the characters apart from busy backgrounds (not the case in this particular drawing). After I’m done inking, I erase any traces of the pencil drawing that’s left over. The drawing is now ready to be scanned (Pic. 5). If I don’t need a border line, I erase that too, and make crop-marks so that I can cut the drawing to size when I’m coloring.

Notice some “x” markings inside the drawing. These are areas that are going to get filled in after I scan the drawing. I could fill it in with the pens, but it takes a lot more time than I’m willing to spend doing that. When this drawing is inside Photoshop, I can easily fill these areas with a click of the mouse.

It takes me anywhere from 4 to 7 hours to get one of these drawings done, depending on how much detail there is. Then, it’s another 3 or more hours to get it colored. I wish I was a faster artist, but you can’t always get what you want!

Voila! Here’s the finished drawing (Pic. 6), all filled up and ready to be colored (Pic. 7). It has been scanned as a gray-scale, 300 dpi image. I clean it up a bit, removing any stray lines or traces of pencil that I might have left behind, and it’s off to get colored.

But that’s a whole other story!…

Well, that’s it. I really hope you liked this brief little explanation. Next time I’ll try to show you how I color the artwork. Stick around!

See you then,

Leandro