Tools of the trade

So, as part of the ongoing ramping-up of my art practice, I got myself a sweet LED lightbox. Instead of a clunky stand-alone unit like the one Ellen Forney is using here, it is a thin panel that sits right on my drawing easel, comme ça:

 

It's a bit of a luxury for a Bad Cartoonist®, but it allows me to do two things.

First, as in the Forney demonstration, I can ink over my pencil layouts on a different sheet of paper, so there's no erasing-all-the-pencil-lines when it's done. And if I screw up or edit or want to edit, I haven't ruined the original or created the need for pints of white-out -- I can just start over on a new sheet, with a clean undamaged original at hand. 

Here's Punkerbelle, in the original pencil and an inked version completed on the lightbox:

The other benefit the lightbox allows is the ability to duplicate images with better consistency. I can design a prop or background that repeats across a strip and retrace my own drawing to create an accurate repetition of the image. This is important for scenes in which creating a sense of stasis or stillness is important.

Here's a strip (in its earliest stages) for which I used this method:

I could never have drawn the couch and calendar that consistently freehand, and the static nature of the room is important to the narrative. (And yes, that's Punkerbelle.)

I am still working old-school, in pencil and ink on paper. In presentations from both Forney and Art Spiegelman, they have said that there is no such thing as "original art" in comics or cartooning anymore: the finished product is sewn together from various hardcopy drawings that are assembled and edited in Photoshop or something similar, if not created directly in a program like Procreate without any  tangible materials at all. It may be nostalgic if not downright atavistic of me, but I'd like to think this lightbox is as high-tech as I get.

We'll see.