“Hmph.”
You might notice some differences in technique with this strip. This post (the link is to the first of 2 parts to the article) by web cartoonist Tom Dell’Aringa was pretty useful to me for thinking about new ways to streamline my process. For one thing, I’ve discovered some uses for checking the “Sample all layers” box for the Wand tool in Photoshop. Also, I looked at some comics in my collection, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind (excellent book!), Bone, and an Optic Nerve issue (all good comics), to see how they dealt with shading (plus I knew Nausicaa and Bone had hilly scenery in them). Bone uses pure black shadows 99% of the time. Jeff Smith can pull that off–I don’t really know how yet. I noticed that Hayao Myazaki and Adrian Tomine had similar techniques for shading–they both used only a few shades of grey. Tomine accomplishes this with clean, ruled hatching for a lighter shade of grey, and cross-hatching with a second set of lines for a darker shade. Myazaki uses cross-hatching with his pen plus two shades of screentone or shading film (maybe a 3rd or 4th shade occasionally).
I had been using probably 10 or more shades of grey previous to looking at those comics, and I knew I wanted to cut back. Also, a couple of strips back I experimented with some manual shading by using hatching. Other than that strip, this is the first one where I hatched the drawing with a pen rather than just using shades of grey in Photoshop. I found that hatching by hand was actually pretty pleasurable and relaxing, so with this strip I’ve gone back to that, as well as using Myazaki’s technique (pretty common technique, I’m sure, not just unique to Myazaki) of using just a few shades of grey in just a few places, rather than all over the place as I had been doing previously.
I hope you guys like it.
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