| Posted: 25 February 2011 at 5:43am | IP Logged | 2
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Is there a tidbit of a trick that you might share about going up to, say, 18x24", or dare I say, 20X30"?•• One of the most distinctive things about comic book art is the line weights. Traditionally, most inkers have used some combination of brush and pen, and this has given much of the work a lush, "organic" look. When the pages were scaled down in the early Seventies (to save on paper costs*), some inkers had difficulty adapting their work from the 12x18 format to the new 10x15. Their inking became thick and heavy, because they were still using the same weight of line on the smaller paper. (Something similar happened during the mid Seventies, when Marvel started the "economical" move of having double-page spreads done on a single sheet of the 10x15 paper turned sideways. This meant that in a standard 6x9 comic, the art was being reproduced at close to actual size -- a spread would be 9x12 -- and it showed! And not in a good way.**) All this is a long way of saying the way to approach larger pieces has much to do with what their "final form" is going to be. If they are intended for reproduction, and therefore reduction, thicken up your line accordingly. If not, let the image dictate the line weights. On a 20x30 commission (or larger), for instance, I don't bump up the line very much, except on foreground elements. After all, I expect these pieces to be viewed at pretty close range, and I don't want the lines to become too cumbersome. -- * Oddly, when I first started at Charlton, they were still using up their stock of the older, larger sheets -- but were having the smaller "live art" area guides printed on them. So Charlton original art from this period has enormous amounts of wasted space around the actual panels. ** For some reason, the tabloids that became popular at this time, such as SUPERMAN vs THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, were also printed without reduction. There, however, inkers seemed better able to adjust.
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