This was great! One question: How do you balance usage of traditional and digital means of coloring or art making in general. As someone who does a lot of coloring digitally and drawing traditionally, I often feel like there's a lot of growth that happens when I work traditionally, but time constraints don't often allow that. Is mastery of traditional painting necessary for a career reliant on digital art?
Thanks! Working traditionally is definitely more time consuming. It takes me about twice the time on average. But it definitely takes you down paths you wouldn’t explore in digital.
It’s not necessary to have traditional skills to work digitally, it’s just a good way to stay engaged. After 30 years computer coloring, I’ve developed systems and techniques that don’t really leave any room for surprises. Using paints and watercolors reintroduces (to me anyway) some sense of unpredictability.
Incredibly interesting observation about the reader experiencing the comic in reverse order of its production!
Will have to let that sink in...
I got my start on black and white mini comics, produced on those old VERY unforgiving Kinko's machines, and maintain a fondness for greyscale design.
Presumably black and white comix would have a distinct experiential effect on readers?
Maybe less immersion, but heightened conceptual impact?
(Like in Sin City, you know you're not in the real world, but you also know for damn sure you're in THAT world?)
I read the Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, and John Totleben Swamp Thing run recently. Starting off on the re-colored digital versions, but if felt weirdly antiseptic, so I tracked down the original issues with Tatjana Wood's beautiful living colors, and noticed something interesting...
Simple colors on textured paper creates this awesome Rorschach effect (the noise from the 4 color printing and paper grain) that allows the viewer's eye to read in their own surface interpretations.
The low-fi road arriving at a similar destination as the hi-fi :)))
"You owe a great debt because of your decisions. That is why this message is for you, just as it was for the house of Jeroboam: 'And he cried against the altar in the word of the Lord, and said, O altar, altar, thus saith the Lord;
Behold, a child shall be born unto the house of David, Josiah by name; and upon thee shall he offer the priests of the high places that burn incense upon thee, and men's bones shall be burned upon thee (1 Kings 13:2)'.
A warning that everything made by human hands and out of greed ends up dead. And with that, the legacy you leave behind."
I have really enjoying your substack posts. I have a question in your post about silence, there was a panel page of Daredevil non talking heads with the woman with the black eye. I purchased the pencils prelim from Anthony Comic Art. Is this just a printed out grey lines that you would digitally ink? Or your actual pencils?
This is a witty and thoroughly enjoyable back and forth that covers some excellent concepts, with relevant visual references. Well done fellas.
This was great! One question: How do you balance usage of traditional and digital means of coloring or art making in general. As someone who does a lot of coloring digitally and drawing traditionally, I often feel like there's a lot of growth that happens when I work traditionally, but time constraints don't often allow that. Is mastery of traditional painting necessary for a career reliant on digital art?
Thanks! Working traditionally is definitely more time consuming. It takes me about twice the time on average. But it definitely takes you down paths you wouldn’t explore in digital.
It’s not necessary to have traditional skills to work digitally, it’s just a good way to stay engaged. After 30 years computer coloring, I’ve developed systems and techniques that don’t really leave any room for surprises. Using paints and watercolors reintroduces (to me anyway) some sense of unpredictability.
That makes complete sense. Thanks for such a thoughtful answer!
Incredibly interesting observation about the reader experiencing the comic in reverse order of its production!
Will have to let that sink in...
I got my start on black and white mini comics, produced on those old VERY unforgiving Kinko's machines, and maintain a fondness for greyscale design.
Presumably black and white comix would have a distinct experiential effect on readers?
Maybe less immersion, but heightened conceptual impact?
(Like in Sin City, you know you're not in the real world, but you also know for damn sure you're in THAT world?)
I read the Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, and John Totleben Swamp Thing run recently. Starting off on the re-colored digital versions, but if felt weirdly antiseptic, so I tracked down the original issues with Tatjana Wood's beautiful living colors, and noticed something interesting...
Simple colors on textured paper creates this awesome Rorschach effect (the noise from the 4 color printing and paper grain) that allows the viewer's eye to read in their own surface interpretations.
The low-fi road arriving at a similar destination as the hi-fi :)))
"You owe a great debt because of your decisions. That is why this message is for you, just as it was for the house of Jeroboam: 'And he cried against the altar in the word of the Lord, and said, O altar, altar, thus saith the Lord;
Behold, a child shall be born unto the house of David, Josiah by name; and upon thee shall he offer the priests of the high places that burn incense upon thee, and men's bones shall be burned upon thee (1 Kings 13:2)'.
A warning that everything made by human hands and out of greed ends up dead. And with that, the legacy you leave behind."
I have really enjoying your substack posts. I have a question in your post about silence, there was a panel page of Daredevil non talking heads with the woman with the black eye. I purchased the pencils prelim from Anthony Comic Art. Is this just a printed out grey lines that you would digitally ink? Or your actual pencils?