I recently drifted off into a little daydream about my progress with my graphic novels and art in general. I remember long, long ago -- 2005, if I remember correctly --when I took my first serious dig at making a fully written and fully drawn comic. At the time, I had just graduated from high school; it was cathartic for many reasons, among them completing 12th grade, which was arguably the most challenging part of my K-12 journey (my bipolar depression had brought me to a major low, costing me a girl I later felt deep affection for and regret for being so closed up -- Nina -- who seemed interested in me, and the deepening concern from my friends over my lingering silence and aversion to hanging out). Getting my GED was proof to myself that this tumultuous part of my life was finally coming to a close, and now my life was in my own hands.
Before starting college in late 2005, I enrolled in a special art program in San Francisco at an academy known as the Art Institutes. The branch in SF was offering a special 5-day crash course in animation. I had always been fascinated by animation; the CGI from the film "Spider-Man 2" was still fresh in my mind, as were fond memories of a recent Nintendo GameCube title I recently completed at the time, "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker", which had an animation style that took me by surprise sooner than I thought (Anybody who's ever played a "Zelda" knows about the controversy regarding this title, having been announced after the dark and mature title "Majora's Mask", which itself was a sequel to "Ocarina of Time", often cited as the greatest of all Zelda games and, for a period of time, the greatest video game of all time). There were two consecutive courses, each was two and a half days. The first was a course in traditional hand-drawn animation. Given the brevity of the weeklong program, our drawn animations were basically done in mannequin/stick figure-style format. I learned that as I had suspected, hand-drawn animation isn't for the faint of heart; that was a LOT of repetitive drawing, almost 100 pages. But it was fun, and for some reason our instructor had a thing with the film "Shrek"; any chance he got, he would diss the film's animation style (Shrek is, of course, a CGI film, but I digress...). We also got a quick shot at human anatomy, and our resources were nothing like I expected -- many of the lesson plans were photocopies from "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way", which seemed oddly fitting since I was just getting my new comic, "The Viper", off the ground. Being my first attempt at the typical "superhero" comic, this was pretty useful.
The remaining two and a half days were spent on the other half of animation, 3D animation. However, unlike the traditional animation class, this was nowhere near as fun or easy. As I tried to animate a simple 3D mannequin, I learned just how different this was from my alma mater, hand-drawn style. Looking back, the biggest problem wasn't the style of animation, but the mechanics -- computers are machines that use calculations and algorithms to execute a single action. They are essentially a massive group of digital chains, and as the adage goes, a "weak" link can derail the whole line. Such was my issue with this style of animation; it took several hours to get the "links" in the proper order, and each "frame" required its own set of chains that needed to be smooth, flawless. By the fourth day, I actually became frustrated, almost angry at hard the task was. It reminded my new enemy back in elementary school, the bane of many students' 1st to 5th grade run -- mathematics. To this day, much as I hate to admit it, I'm still very weak in math; scraping by with Cs in even college-level classes was the norm for me. Eventually, I got an animation completed, but I added some improv: along with a walking figure, I created a sort of "playhouse room" with a bouncing ball and a wobbly TV playing the hand-drawn animation I did in the prior class. My classmates were really impressed at those little tweaks in the background, saying the ball and the TV more than made up for the wonky walking figure. And throughout the week, after class we went to five different restaurants for a celebratory dinner, all expenses paid. It reminded me of a special dinner hosted by my 12th grade Graphic Design instructor, who was also a big fan of comics.
When I started my summer vacation following my first year in college, I had already completed the first issue of The Viper, which was to be a 3-issue miniseries. It was all penciled, sans the cover. But I became intrigued about how to stylize the work, as I learned a lot of the tools and tricks of Adobe Photoshop in 12th grade. After researching on the web, I found a way to digitally "ink" my pages, and then add color to the line work... but it took up a LOT of time and a LOT of curving nearly a hundred tiny lines with the Pen Tool. At times I wanted to give up, but I was still scared stiff of inking the pages by hand for obvious reasons; the thought of drawing the wrong line or a making a mistake in line weight totally destroying a meticulous penciled was too much to bear. I kept at it through 2006, and eventually I took the plunge and tried my hand at inking by hand. When I started the first chapter for Lil' Hero Artists in 2007 I had become pretty comfortable with inking by hand, when I realized that the pens the "pros" use don't work for everyone. Everybody has a preference. Mine were simple "gel-ink" Pentel ballpoint pens; their ink ran smoother than regular ballpoints, which often trip up due to occasional clogs. I learned how to make my own "line pressure"; I didn't need a fountain/calligraphy pen or a brush pen, I could just widen a curve like a crescent and fill the in empty space inside the shape. Having learned this skill, it wasn't long before I finished Chapter 1 of Lil' Hero Artists. The difference in line weight and curves with those pens came out better than I thought. It was around that time that New York small press publisher Alterna Comics was sponsoring a submissions contest. The winners would be offered a contract by Alterna, under creator-owned conditions. The creators kept all rights except publishing; intellectual property and copyright remained with the creator alone, negating a sale of all ownership unlike the Big Two and their two close-second presses who, in the Big Two's case, "buy" the rights and thus assume ownership of the ideas through the "work for hire" model (strangely enough, at the time I had no idea what "work for hire" meant, I thought all publishers let the creator(s) keep the copyright; many of the storybooks I read as a child listed the author as the "copyright owner", but in reality the author was the author, but the publisher was the true owner of the IP rights).
In 2008, after I parted ways with Alterna on good terms, I learned about drawing "tablets" that simulate drawing on a computer screen, which had become popular among graphic novelists. I saw a few graphic novels and manga that used that method, among them were "Aoi House" (a shojo "yaoi" (lesbian romance) series), and "Inverloch", an Elder Scrolls-esque fantasy completely digitally rendered by one author, Sarah Ellerton (she's long finished the 5-volume series and was published under Seven Seas Entertainment. However, after Volume 2 Seven Seas ended their contract with Ellerton due to lackluster sales, returning the IP rights to her. She reprinted the entire saga through a POD (print-on-demand) service to make it available on her own terms, but as of now she's de-listed the whole saga -- buyers now have to risk going to eBay and the like, who are notorious for hosting pricegougers). I decided to try one out, buying a Wacom Bamboo Fun unit. Turns out the people were right; the tablet could be hooked up to my desktop and came with a stylus pen that could simulate pressure. I had to install a driver before use, and before long I was on my way.
However, I soon learned I made a slight mistake with the Wacom -- I didn't read the fine print. The tablet unit itself was a decent size, but the actual drawing area was much, MUCH smaller than I thought. The stylus also became more difficult to use over time, which combined with the small drawing surface area led to a lot of hand cramps. Translating the lines to the screen only added to the discomfort, forcing me to bend my drawing arm at odd angles just to get the lines right. A bunch of other widgets on the tablet actually made it harder to draw consistent lines than easier, and lint getting on the drawing surface always spelled bad news if not cleaned up swiftly. I soon found myself discarding the thing after years of unsuccessful attempts at an artwork I was happy with; the last page I inked with the Wacom was page 4 of Sneakers' U-Force #3, afterwards it was back to inking by hand for me. Over the following years, I became even more confident and efficient in inking by hand; I was producing up to 6 pages in one day, penciled and inked.
In 2023, I bought a simple HP laptop (which I'm using to type this right row) after a disaster with an Acer that lasted only a year and a half (again, didn't pay attention -- the Acer I bought had so many 2 to 1-star reviews, most citing the laptop eventually not starting and staying on the "loading" screen (I remember waiting a little over an hour when I witnessed this, to no avail). Worse still, closing the lid on this thing eventually wound up shutting the whole thing down instead of going into "sleep mode", which frustrated the hell out of me). Turns out, the Acer operated through a cooling fan vent, and at a certain point the fan stopped spinning. I'm guessing it overheated or something. But man, I was so mad when the Acer apparently "died", as the family desktop was on its own death throes. The new HP laptop doesn't appear to run on a cooling fan and has yet to fully crash -- thought I often have to refresh (restart) it when the storage capacity reaches its limit, and apps take longer to open. I'm looking for ways to free up space, but the apps that take up the most space seem to be vital to the laptop's functionality; if I delete them to free up space, it could kill the whole CPU.
As I was wrapping up the art for Volume 2 of the "Curse of Creation" arc in Lil' Hero Artists, I poked around even more with a new, 2023 edition of Adobe Photoshop. I had purchased it on subscription with Adobe, and right from the start I saw just how much the app evolved. So many new tools along with the original ones, which were more streamlined and easier to use. Midway through Chapter IX, starting around the fight scene between Viper, Ted, and Katy and Nightshade, I had found a way to again replicate "pen pressure" lines with a new tool: the Smoothing gauge. The lower the gauge, the easier it to literally draw a curve by mouse. Back in the day, digitally inking with a mouse was all but ill-advised by many, as I found out while "inking" The Viper #1.
With this tool came a lot of freedom, as now the lines "smoothed" the curves as I dragged the mouse cursor to direct them. This allowed for that "smooth digital inking" I had been trying to accomplish for years, and it also sped up the remaining pages in Volume 2. Greyscale toning was a snap after all the line work was smoothed out. I had also used this strategy on the final few pages in Sneakers #11 which, along with the streamlined coloring and shading tools, allowed me to speed up the process without sacrificing my intended outcome.
Both of these closing chapters in "Curse of Creation: Lil' Hero Artists, Volume 2" and "Sneakers' U-Force Volume 2" (whose cover sports a redone version of Issue #8's cover using the aforementioned Smoothing and coloring/Gradient tools) taught me so many things about the potential of simple tweaks that really spice up a piece of art. I went into Sneakers' U-Force #12 starting with that strategy, but by page 10 I found myself going back to hand-inking. It wasn't that I no longer liked using these new tools, but rather because I noticed myself slowly falling back into perfectionism -- something I had to pull myself away from back when I started Lil' Hero Artists. This time was worse though, because now I was working with digital tools. Many people with software like Adobe Photoshop can easily develop an obsession with the "intended" outcome, leading them to overuse the "undo" and "redo" like hell and eventually fall into frustration and maybe even quit the work-in-progress. I'd been there before in 2005 with The Viper #1, and I refused to go back. I wound up using Photoshop for touch-ups on the line art and vibrant colors/shading only, but for inking I've returned to using pens or "liners" -- what I currently use are Macron drawing pens with a medium-small thickness.
Has anyone here ever used a Wacom or similar drawing device? If so, what was your experience like -- was it a beneficial tool to your work, or was it just a major detriment your project and possibly even your enthusiasm for said work? Just curious...
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