A return to ink

I was talking with an artist friend of mine recently about how both of us are struggling with feeling bored and unmotivated in our work. He suggested that it was maybe time to return to old tools and practical drawing instead of doing everything digitally like we both have done for over a decade now.

Concurrent to this has also been a lot of thinking about the rise of generative AI and how I will remain relevant/employable as an artist moving forward. I reasoned that AI can’t draw on paper (yet) and so it’s another reason for me to return to using traditional tools and doing something well that AI cannot. I’ve also been invited to participate in an art show in a few weeks and so all of the stars seemed to be aligning to push me back to drawing on paper.

I began my art career as an inker, working over other artist’s pencils for several years. I developed a reputation - for good or for ill - as an inker that could “rescue” pencils that were lacking. I had the cockiness of youth and the desire to be a penciller myself and so I would often be quite bold in my inking, redrawing a lot of the page to “fix” it. Many years later I would meet one of these pencillers for the first time at a convention party and immediately apologized for the amount of redrawing I did on his work. Fortunately he was extremely gracious and said that he was happy with the final result (I think he was being kind).

Eventually I advanced to becoming a penciller and a curious thing happened - all of my cockiness and confidence melted away and now I became very careful and insecure about my work, and the energetic and bold inking I would do over others became very stiff and restrained on my own work. I also would redraw pages over and over (a habit I still have to this day).

I started doing touch ups digitally, making small corrections in Photoshop to scanned ink artwork, and slowly those small touch ups became more common, I would redraw faces or resize elements that weren’t in correct proportion. Soon I was drawing entire panels digitally, in love with the freedom that endless manipulation afforded me. And then I just started drawing everything digitally, reasoning that it was faster and I was happier with the work.

I have an agent that sells my original artwork and I told him that I would no longer be working on paper, so there would be no more new art to sell. He urged me to reconsider since it would be cutting off a revenue stream for both of us. But I was in too deep and decided to commit to being a digital artist.

I do feel that working digitally for a decade taught me a lot, and definitely gave me a lot of confidence in drawing when I always had the safety net of being able to instantly undo or adjust everything. But I also lost my proficiency at inking on paper. Occasionally I would take commissions and found that I was struggling with them, because I was so out of practice.

And so I’ve made the decision that I want to return to drawing on paper for the majority of my work going forward. I decided that I want to practice for a while, I feel like I need to literally retrain myself by inking over other artists to get back into the swing of it. This week I have been printing out blue line pages of the great Spanish artist Alfonso Font and inking them.

Fortunately I still retain my speed - despite feeling very rusty I still managed to do each of these in only a couple of hours. It’s also been very instructive, trying to replicate his line work and be comfortable with a loose messiness that I usually feel great discomfort with in my own work.

These shaky uneven lines and loosely-described objects would usually make my brain itch, but I realize by looking at the page as a whole that it doesn’t matter - the page looks great anyway. So this is something that I am going to attempt to bring to my own work going forward - we’ll see how it goes!