9:40am. First off, I get an High Resolution e-mail of the pencils from Mark Brooks, who pencilled this splash page. I download the file, clean it up a bit, convert it to blue line, and print it out on a full size printer which I can feel bristol boards into. First thing I do is ink the boarders.
4:45pm. I finishing up inking both figures with a brush and quill. Some of the halos, I would ink around. Other times, I would use white ink and create that halo which separates objects from a black background. I usually wait until everything is done in black ink before I even think about using white ink for halos or effects. If I make a mistake, I'll pull out the white-out and correct it. Very rarely do I need to pull out the white out to fix corrections. Unless I sneeze in the process of drawing a line or something.
5:45pm. I work on the tapered speed line in the background. Only this time, I'm not using a brush to taper. I'm using a crow quill to whip these lines in because it needs to look non organic. I think of it this way... Non organic objects has to be perfectly straight, rounded, and arched. Organic objects has to be more natural and free flowing, more forgiving.
6:05 pm. At this point, I'm all finished with using the black ink. I double check to see if I'm missing any lines or blacks which needs to be spotted. Nope... All done. I take out my white ink, give it a shake to have a better mixture, and start using that. Since this is blue line, I would just take the white it and shake it up. Now if this was original pencils, I would usually double task. How? Check this out... I take an eraser with my right hand and hold it like how anyone would hold a eraser. Then I put the bottle of white ink in between my index and middle fingers and hold that above the eraser. While I'm erasing the pencils underneath my inks, I'm also shaking up the white it for a better mixture. Two birds with one stone! That's one of my time saving secrets for ya! All right, back to the finished page. Once the white ink is nicely mixed, I go in there and add more halos and effects where needed (like the scales on the outfit or the halo lines between armour pieces). After that, it's all done! Finito!
I scan the inks onto photoshop at a resolution of 600 dpi full size. Once that's done, I upload the file to Marvel's FTP site. Then I take the same high resolution file, shrink it down to 100 dpi and save it as a jpeg file so I can e-mail it my editor to view. The below file is the actual jpeg that I used to send to my editor. Enjoy.















