For a while now, I’ve been experimenting with drawing a comic about a hockey team made of opossums called the Downward Spirals. Essentially, this team is a bunch of cheats and losers who are constantly getting beaten up and put down by the better teams in their league. The teams are all species oriented. The beavers, shown below, play for the Dam Quixotes. The raccoon squad is the Apple Corps and so on.
What I’ve been having the most problem with is the speed of my drawing. Normal artistic methods would say that I pencil my drawing first and then ink it. For anyone who knows about this, inking can take forever, especially if you use a graphic pen. I’ve never figured out how to use a brush. Brushes are supposed to be faster and cleaner if you know how to do it. My problem is that it always turns out sloppy and blotched.
But then I had a revelation.
You see, I draw pretty darn good when I just use a ball point pen. This is the way I learned to draw, because I would always draw on lined paper in school with my pens. I learned how to shade, cross hatch and vary line width. And usually, after my roughs are down I can fix things pretty good by going staight to ball-point pen.
And even today, almost 20 years since high school, I still draw quite a bit that way. Just look at my “Church Sketches” entries on this very blog.
With that in mind, I tried doing a Downward Spirals comic by going straight to ball-point pen on old comic-book boards (Yes, in my house the only use for comic book bagging boards is to draw on. I can’t believe people spend money on those.)
Anyway, here’s what I came up with. Please let me know what you think …
That looks really good, man. Doesn’t look like it was done with a ball point pen.
Thanks, Travis, I think it might be the way I do my tooning in the future. And to think all the money I spent on graphic pens! Ugh!