JL8 #264 Production Journal, Epilogue

Good afternoon, everyone! I've been hard at work inking the next five pages of JL8, and that got me thinking: I never did a follow-up to the penciling breakdown for JL8 #264, so I thought it'd be fun to take a look at my inking process. Now, inking can be quite a different beast from penciling; there are a lot of decisions to make, but most of the really difficult ones, like composition, speech balloon placement, or scale of the characters have already been figured out. Now, you're just trying to decide how best to make the panel pop and accentuate things like volume, depth of field, etc. Let's get to it, shall we?

1. As with penciling, you start off with a pretty standard element: with penciling, it's a blank panel and with inking, it's finished pencils! There's not a ton of decision making to be made at this point, as through force of habit, most people have some basic decisions already made, so let's dive into some of those.

2. Personally, I almost always ink the lettering and speech balloons first, because for me, I feel most comfortable inking from the front and working my way back. That being said, speech balloons and captions are THE most foreground element 99.9999% of the time, and as such, it makes perfect sense to begin with them. For the lettering itself, I tend to use a .05 Copic Multiliner pen, and for the balloon, I'll use a Micron 03 pen.

3. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. As I stated above, I prefer working front to back, which means inking the elements furthest in the foreground, and receding into the background from there. Aside from the speech balloon, the furthermost foreground element is Diana--as you can see, she overlaps plenty of the panel, but nothing overlaps her; that makes her the front of the panel. I'll go ahead and ink her first. For characters, I'll use a Winsor & Newton Series 7 No. 2 sable hair brush with Higgins Black India ink.

4. Now that Diana's inked, I'll move on to the secondmost foreground element which in this instance is Clark. I'll continue to use my brush at this point, but you may notice that there are a few things left un-inked such as Clark's S-shield or either characters' eyes. This is because I prefer tools where I have super-fine control, so I'll come back to these with a thin-tipped pen at a later point.

5. Here's where I finish up most of my brushwork, with the remaining background characters. You may also notice that I added some detail over on the lefthand side. Again, this is because I know most of my brushwork is at an end, so I finish up any other elements I prefer to use it for, such as blades of grass. I also chose to use it for the drop shadows of Clark and Diana, but in that case, I attempted a dry brush technique to give it a rougher feel, like the pavement they're standing on.

6. With the characters all but finished, I prefer to go in and actually put the final touches to be done with that segment of inking: I'll go in with a pen and add remaining details such as Clark's S-shield, the circles for Hal's Green Lantern symbol, and Clark and Diana's pupils. I'll also drop in the spot blacks where they belong, such as Clark and Diana's hair, and the arms and legs of Hal's costume. For the minor detail work, I'll return to using a Copic Multiliner pen, usually a .01 or even a .005, depending, and for the black fills I'll use a Copic 110 Special Black marker.

7-8. As stated in the image, the inking process gets pretty self-explanatory from here: I'll continue to move further into the background, inking elements as I go. In example 7, it's the picnic benches, while in example 8, I move further back and ink the fence posts, bushes, and even some trees. During this stage, my tools are pretty similar to what I mentioned in step 6: for thin detail work, I'll use Copic Multiliner pens of varying thickness, from .005 to .035, and then for large areas of black, I'll use a Copic 110 Special Black marker.

9-10. And here we are at the finish line. This part can take a few minutes or it can take a few hours; it all depends. In this case, almost the entire background is giant bushy trees which are pretty easy to ink. Sometimes, it's rows of houses, which are not. Either way, once the last remaining background elements get whittled down, you have a fully inked panel, as seen in example 10!

So to recap, inking a panel--for me--really just follows a simple theory: start at the front and work your way back. Begin with foreground elements that I use my brush on, and work backwards to the elements I use pens on. In some instances I'll come back in with white ink (basically just paint, honestly) and add highlights over black areas, like elbows on Hal, or some hair elements on Diana, but other than that, this is a complete breakdown of a standard panel. I really hope you enjoyed it! As a bonus, I've included ALL the photos I took of this particular panel process in the attachments below. I hope you enjoy them!

-Yale