blacksad

 For one of my last inking exercises I decided to try something crazy and new and go with an ink wash. In honor of that new-fangled insanity, I'm gonna to do something new with the post too! Instead of just showing you  the finished product, I'm showing you it all, from the early sketches to the final piece.

The assignment was a Blacksad pin up, if you don't know it, look it up NOW! So firstly I made a bunch of tiny thumbnails to get a scene in my mind. Most of these are no larger than an inch and half tall and they're done as fast as possible. Took me a while to get what I wanted because perspective and I don't always get along so well.

Anyway, next step is the detailed thumbnail or rough pencil. It's only about four inches tall on paper. You can see me throwing down perspective lines like it's going out of style.

And the next step is really just an extension of the last - the value study! I took the scan of the thumbnail and printed it out so I could use grey tone markers to figure out the values.

Totally off topic, but is it 'grey' or 'gray'? Firefox thinks it's 'gray' with an 'a' because it's giving me those angry red squiggly lines under 'grey' with 'e'. Which really stinks because I think grey looks WAY classier.

Okay, so here I'm trying to keep the focus on the couple by using more contrast in the foreground.

Also, to be ENTIRELY HONEST, I think I like the tiny value study best. Probably because I love markers way more than ink wash. And that awesome browny hue isn't hurting either.

ANYWAY, from there I moved on to the actual piece, a giant compared to the rest of the work at 11" by 17". And hours later, you get this...