In an attempt to ready myself for producing all of Bosh and Bill (and also for fun), I’ve loaded up my Kindle with a bunch of books on the topic of writing and producing comic books, which I’ve been reading over the past several weeks. I think I’ve read about 5 books so far. The most recent one I finished was @TheRealStanLee’s book,Stan Lee’s How to Draw Comics: From the Legendary Creator of Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four, X -Men, and Iron Man. During the chapter about inking he mentioned grabbing someone’s pencils from a forum online and printing those out for inking practice. I loved this idea and it sounded fun, so I started searching for “A3 comic page pencils” on DeviantArt, and eventually I found this work by biroons.

I downloaded the image and opened it in Clip Studio Paint and with one click turned the pencil layer into a cyan-colored draft that I then printed out on A3 heavy duty comic paper on my Epson 1280 large format color printer for inking practice.

I’ve never done this before, so I was basically just trying all the things that I’d read in several of the books I’ve been reading. I used a combination of brush and ink, alongside a few ink pens. I used a .03 and .08 for the thicker lines. The entire time I felt like “this is like a coloring book for adults” which my wife echoed when she tried to ink a little bit in the second panel. It was fun and I managed to ink the entire page in about 5 hours of total inking. For whatever reason, I started at the bottom and moved my way up the page. The bottom right panel and the top panel were both done exclusively with the pens. The second panel was entirely done in brush, so it’s the roughest looking of the bunch, but I’m still pleased with it. The 3rd and 4th panels were a mix of both. Here’s a succession set of pictures of my progress.

In this next one I decided to get rid of the multiple buildings in panel 4 that were giving me problems and decided to also add a night sky to panel 2.

And finished…

I’m pretty proud of how well I did here. The final panel, which was the first one I did is great as far as I’m concerned, and although there are multiple problems with the all brush panel 2,it still looks pretty damn good and I was able to get some real detail with the brush. Also, all those lines in panel 1 were hand drawn sans ruler so not too shabby.

I’ve already printed out someone else’s comic page from the Avengers on the reverse side of this page, which I’ll tackle next. I’ll be really impressed if I ever start producing pencils of my own that are the quality of these drawings I grabbed for inking. One thing I know for sure: Spider-man is a bastard to ink with all those stupid web patterns.

Here’s a shot of the work on my new drafting table in medias res:

Jackson (my almost 5 year old son & co-creator of Daddy & Boo) and I were discussing Bosh on the way to school today. We were discussing what color he should be, because as you can see in previous posts, I have in the past depicted him in light pink. However, my wife Kristin says she doesn’t like the pink and that Bosh should just be white like most bunny rabbits.

During this back and forth we came up with the idea of him changing color depending on his mood. Normal Bosh is white and his ears are floppy. Startled or irritated Bosh starts turning pink and his ears shoot up straight. If he reaches angry he turns full on red and goes into berserker mode, attacking whoever angered him. What’s great about this is that once he goes pink, there’s normally no going back, because he hates being pink and cute etc, so he becomes super self-conscious about it and he’s more easily revved up to full on berserker mode.