Maybe this is just another form of procrastination, but I wanted to see how my inking would look shrunk down to the size in which I’ll be printing my comic book. As you can see, I’m not really shrinking it all that much. A real comic book artist might work on an 11×17 sheet, but I’m sticking to letter size for convenience sake.

One of the panels I’ll be inking any day now for my graphic novel. (Actually, I’ll probably redraw this completely, but I had to post something!)

I just got back from seeing “Lincoln,” a movie about the wacky hijinks that ensue when a skinny, big-eared guy from Illinois is elected to his second term as President. Great movie, even though I had to sit in the front row and weave my craned neck in the air in order to soak in all the historical goodness.

Tonight in class I started in on my penciling for the final product. And I think I’ve decided that I’d rather do most of my penciling on the computer; it’s much easier to revise, and less carpal tunnel-y. However, I still want to ink by hand. So once I’ve “penciled” on the computer, I can print it out and then use my handy LightPad to ink.

To that end, I’ve ordered and fallen in love with yet another pen. This one is a disposable brush pen that is very forgiving of my shaky paw. Here’s an example:

Might not seem like much, but that’s about as nuanced as I can get at that size. And the final product will be reduced to about the size of a dime.

Hey look, it’s my impulse purchase of the week! Looking ahead to my finished comic book, I decided I wanted to do pencil art which I then trace with ink. That’s where this very evenly lit LED panel, the Artograph LightPad, comes in. As you can see here, my pencil drawing shows up very well through a thick piece of bristol paper.

Back in the stone ages, people might use a warm, bulky box with a fluorescent bulb for this purpose, but this thing stays cool to the touch and is about as thick as a modern laptop. It even comes with a suede carrying case.

The nice thing about a piece of technology that only does one thing is that I can pretty much give it a positive review after 2 minutes with it. But I’ll let you know if it blows up or something.