Periscope: Portland's storyboard and comics studio.

Everything you need to know about the net in two sentences: "I discovered MuggleNet that first-ever afternoon and I went in the chatroom, and it was so funny. I was treated with outright contempt." - J.K. Rowling on her first visit to a Harry Potter chatroom.

Over on the TCJ board, someone asked a question about learning to ink with a brush. I wrote the following reply which I hope might helpful to someone, somewhere.

The only way to learn to ink with a brush is, unfortunately, to work with a brush for months on end, getting a tiny bit better every day. It takes time and sweat and a lot of frustrating fuck-ups. And it's not enough to learn technique- you have to learn how to draw; how to imagine three dimensional forms, how to imagine light falling on them, how to arrange shapes on a page. There's a lot to it.

That said, if you'd like a good excercise for practicing brush techniques, try this:

Find a good reproduction of a page of black and white art whose technique you'd like to emulate. Blow it up to the size the artist worked at, (or your best guess of this.)

Scan the enlargement at 3-400 dpi, use photoshop to turn the black lines into light blue, and print it out on good bristol on an oversized printer if you have one, or in two sections on a normal printer if you don't.

Then, with the xerox as a guide, ink the blueline, trying to reproduce the original as accurately as possible.

I've been posting links to reviews of my own stuff lately. Let's take a look at how some of Matthew's recent work: Broken Frontier| Comixfan | Paperback reader | Hollywood Jesus | CHUD

Jesse Hamm's Eisner sketches, (via Tom.)

Not likely to break the internet in half: Don Heck's unpublished pencils for an unlicensed NASCAR comic.

And finally, a picture of Dave Johnson:



See you next time.
-Steve