Here comes the good part. It’s part three of the four-part series counting down to MoCCA Fest and the debut of my anthology, Oak & Linden. You can read part 1 and part 2 if you’re into tracing paper sketches, and I’ll also make one composite post on June 6th, the day of MoCCA Fest. – Prolongin’ Pat

I tend to work at “half up,” which I learned from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. In other words, the original art is one and a half times the size of the printed graphics. The shrinking makes the lines tighter and disguises inconsistencies and little stray marks and the like. The standard for comics is to work on 11″×17″ paper and print at about 6½”×10″ and that’s the size I’ve been working. For a wraparound cover with bleed space at this same scale, I needed to work on some 18″×24″ paper. As I said a few weeks ago, I hadn’t done that since in the days of art school. I feel like a big boy again.

Here you can see the daintily traced pencil line on the right half of the page.

Now, it should be said that I’m very bad at drawing lightly. I’ve compensated by using blue pencils (specifically the Copy-Not Non-Photo Blue and Col-Erase Light Blue, both from Prismacolor, and both with an eraser on the end) that don’t reproduce in black & white. For this project I knew I wanted to use colored ink washes instead of my typical Photoshop colors and I didn’t want blue lines everywhere so I I had to compensate for my pencil mashing some other way. So I drew everything with regular pencils on a piece of drawing paper left over from sophomore drawing class, then lightboxed the lines onto a sheet of bristol for the final product. I usually leave my pencils pretty rough and finish the drawing while I’m inking. Well, this case is different, again, because of those ink washes. I figured I wouldn’t have as much leeway as I normally do to throw white (if you’re wondering, right now I use Pro White opaque watercolor) over all the lines I don’t like, because of how the colors would react on top of the paint. Thus, I drew some pretty tight pencils. I even used a ruler for the perspective lines! Almost worthy of being inked by somebody else, like a superhero comic.

But it was inked by me. I ain’t no sellout! (With Rapidographs—if you’re in the market for these technical drawing pens, wait for the back to school sales to get the the seven piece set. Every art store in New York majorly slashes the price at the beginning of each semester.) I didn’t fill in any major black areas because I’m totally into doing that with Windsor & Newton Designer’s Black right now. It comes out really, really black, like black hole black, but unfortunately it’s a guasch, not an ink, which means it’s water soluble. So yet again, I’m compromising for those goddamn colored inks: