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.
