Capes & Babes, a webcomic by Chris Flick

Now that it’s been a full day since I’ve looked at the inked version of today’s strip, I realize I should have made the two expressions in Joey’s face in the first and second panel a lot more different. As it stands, it looks like the two figures were a cut and paste job – but I assure you, they weren’t. Each panel was individually sketched in blue pencil and inked by hand.

Not that I have anything against cutting and pasting whenever an artist needs to do that. Lord knows I’ve done it on more than a few occasions. In my personal opinion, there is absolutely no difference between an artist that cuts and pastes a character from one panel to the next then there is those artists who leave big areas blank on their canvas because they know they will fill it in with black using Photoshop’s paint bucket tool.

If a technique saves an artist time, then by all means, he or she should use that technique.

For me though, some things that same to be time-savers for some end up being time wasters for me. For example, this is one of the reasons why Capes & Babes still isn’t drawn digitally yet. I just haven’t been able to master the Wacom yet so I spend lots of time doing something digitally that I could have done faster and easier with pen, ink and paper. Likewise, it’s not always the easiest thing for me to duplicate a character and slap them on to a random background. Sometimes it is but quite often, it’s just faster and easier for me to quickly rough sketch the character and then add inks to the whole piece at the same time.

Anyway, that’s just my random, “artistic thought of the day” today.

Currently listening to “So What” by Pink.

-Chris