So yesterday was the first day of MIX and I was talking to my friend, the honorable Steve Stwalley. We were talking about frustrations in drawing comics. I had mentioned that lately I hate every page that I draw. I had brought a couple pages with me to the convention to ink and I showed him the one I was working on. I wasn’t really happy with it, but since I use Photoshop for a good part of each page the artwork is really only half of the finished page. I don’t know if I like a page or not until I’ve scanned it and played around with it for a bit.
So I thought that I’d find out with you if I liked one of the pages I inked yesterday.
So, first up, the original page:
As you can see, I don’t even ink the panel borders or write legibly in the balloons anymore. Pretty lousy page so far, but I get to work on converting the art from grayscale, to bitmap and then back to grayscale. God do I hate this art.
So it’s looking a little better…now to add the panel borders.
So now it’s coming together a bit. I don’t hate it. I’m starting to see the potential in this page.
I then delete the scribble in the word balloons and start blackening in the appropriate parts.
I fix the poorly textured background in the second panel and it’s really pulling together. I clean up some of the stray lines in the floor and I’m close to liking it.
If you look behind the girl with the cellphone on the left side of the page in the second panel, we see a movie poster for the upcoming film ‘The Walrus’. I thought about calling it “The Walrus Begins” but decided (wisely) against it. I didn’t want to keep the poster as it was, so I decided to change it.
I erased the art in the poster, and I see I forgot to fix the lettering in the space above the ticket counter. I get working on both of these things.
The movie has now changed into a Julia Roberts-esque movie called “I Like Love”. Ticket prices has also been added to reflect the charges for adult as well as children tickets. I wish I was better with layers, etc because the poster is a little clunky but I can live with it. I add the lettering in the balloons and I’m done.
So I’ve gone from hating it to being indifferent to liking it. I wish I LOVED it but it’ll do.
Tiny Boxes 
One thing I’ve done that helps me enjoy my digital lettering – go find a font (or make one yourself) that resembles your handwriting. I enjoy my lettering, but I found a professional font that resembles my writing that I enjoy. I bought a full license so I can use it whenever – and it has a very familiar feel to me now.
That’s a really cool idea. I like computer lettering for the sake of readability (is that a word?) but I like the organic look of hand letterering.
If you’re serious about a hand lettered look. I’ve used “ashcan” in the past and felt it was close enough to my hand writing http://www.blambot.com/font_ashcan.shtml
If you have extra time try fontifier http://www.fontifier.com/ for making your own font. They even have a template.
As for the page, I can relate. Your line are nice and clean and they look great. I suffer the similar problem that everything feels like a rough draft until it’s finished.
I just looked up this font and it looks really good. I like that. Thanks for the heads up!