Proses pages | Inking: T3 Rise of the Machines
Beckett Comics
Script Ivan Brandon
Pencils Goran Parlov
Inks Salgood Sam
Colors Paul Mounts
At the time that I did this job, it was probably the biggest comic book project I’d ever been involved with numbers wise. The first issue, where most of the art on this page comes from, had a print run of 200,000 copies! It was also the largest inking job I’d ever done at 80+ pages. Normally i just draw my own comics, but at the time i needed work and saw a post on the old Engine message board, and responded. The ad said they were looking for someone to do a Toth style line, which was appealing. Not to mention the penciler Goran, if your going to do something like that he’s ideal to work with.
So, I Did a test, and i was in. There we a few hiccups in the schedule, when the pace was steady I found that it wasn’t hard to do 2 pages a day minimum, & often I was doing 3 to 4. Bit monotonous compared to drawing your own book, Inking. But it was also very educational working with Goran’s very refined story telling and construction. Proved a good exercise for my own work when i next drew the Rise and Fall of it all.
Method: I didn’t and still don’t have a large format scanner, and at the time also did not have a large printer so i had to improvise here a bit. To maintain the classic inking style I had to work 60% larger than print. But working on 11×17 was not really an option. So i cut up the pages into panels and printed them onto 8×10 inch squares of card stock – for larger full page images I’d use key lines in the art to split the panel up by and did the same. Those were inked and then scanned and rejoined using the pencils as a guide for matching up things the way Goran intended. It helped I was not inking the original pencils, but scans sent to me by email. Which has the benefit of making it a lot less of a problem when mistakes and accidents happen. Just reprint and do over.
I’m posting both pencils and the ink here, so you can see the work. The first 6 pages shown were done with a larger brush, my own personal preference in general. But the end result was a bit to dark and not quite as tight as what they were after so I switched to thinner brushes and dropped pretty much all textures and hatching. I used drawing pens and a fine brush. The change over occurred in stages between the 15th & 26th pages on book 1.
