THE SIMPSONS NEWS

This is my last week before I go into the second part of my hiatus, which will be three weeks long. We have Friday off so it looks like I’ll be going into my hiatus a day early.

I managed to finish all my board work by Monday. Tuesday, instead of laying out the Couch Gag as I was suppose to do, I was given layout work on Act 2. We do layout on a different program than the storyboards so it took me a bit to get used to working on the program again.  Since we have Friday off, I really have to make sure I get everything done by the end of today.

VIDEOS

THE SAGA OF BIORN is a fantastic Bachelor film project from The Animation Workshop. It’s funny, fun, well animated, well acted, with incredible designs. I’m just amazed:

MY WEB COMIC

The finished page 1 of the new Black Terror Kid comic:

Last week, I put up a rough of page one. This week I thought I would show you the tools I use to make my comics:

Well, sometimes I tend to use a regular Color erase red pencil to do under drawing work and a mechanical pencil for clarifying. Other times, I just go straight in with the mechanical pencil (lead 0.7). For erasers I use a white rubber eraser and an ever so useful kneaded eraser (can’t live with one).  I also use a green or a blue pencil when putting in my perceptive grid and a transparent ruler to do any straight lines during the penciling stage:

For inking, on the other hand, I use all kinds of fun stuff.

I don’t like using felt tip pens when I ink comics. I use them all the time otherwise, but not on my comics.  I like to use dip pens, brushes and my non felt tip brush pen. So here are my tools:

By FAR my favorite tool is the Pentel refillable brush pen. I use it for EVERYTHING. Including field sketching.  My comic was 90% inked with this pen. I LOVE IT!

If you’ve never heard of it, the pen has a synthetic brush on it and you unscrew the base to input an ink cartridge. It’s fantastic. I had to put in a new cartridge, half way though my inking.  It was half full when I began.

The rest of my tools are a LOT more traditional. Quills, dip pens, brushes, and ink.

1. The ink is Pelikan black ink.  It’s not as black as I would like but it’s better than the Higgins ink I was using before.  Problem with the Pelikan is that it’s a bit pricey.

2. These are the nibs I use to letter with.

• A.  Hunt dome point. (which I forgot I had and didn’t use this time.  I sure could have used it).
• B.   Speedball A-5 was used for all the letters in the balloons except for the bold lettering. It’s the smallest Speedball nib and the “A” series has a square tip.  Speedball nibs are interesting because they really retain a lot of ink.  It takes a long time for them to run out once dipped.
• C.   Speedball B-4 was used for all the bold text. The “B” series has a round tip.

3.  Speedball B-3, I used to draw the border and the word balloons.  The Speedball nibs are good when you want your line to stay the same width the whole time. No thick and thin effect.  I didn’t use any rulers when inking my work so these came in handy.

4.   Gillett #170 nib was used mostly for lettering slightly smaller letters, like the ones on the signs. I also used it when inking a scratchy sound effect in page 3.  It unfortunately cut into the paper on a page and caused a smudge to happen when I erased the pencil lines two days later.

5.  Not sure what the technical term for this one is, Gillett 291 perhaps? In any case, this tiny little crow quill was the first kind of ink pen I ever used. My parent gave me one when I was in Junior High. I rarely use it now but it DID come in REALLY handy when inking tiny little details. Like The Black Terror Kid’s skull and crossbones logo on his outfit.

6.   An old beat up brush I’ve had for years. It’s tip is all crooked. Once upon a time, I used it to ink with, now I all I do with it is fill in big areas with black ink.

Hope you liked the small tour of my tools.

WRITING

Didn’t get much done on my “Illustrated Film” this week.  I started revising the treatment but the Magick system I came up is different enough, that I have to really rework some of the fight scenes. Including the  first attack upon Rob. He is no longer going be dodging fireballs.  I made it so that the Sorcerers now use blood magick and sacrifice animals to make their magick work.  It’s a bit less “practical” to do.  I’m still working on it. I’ll keep you posted.

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