Inking Blues

I'm bad at this writing frequently thing....The last couple of weeks, I put Friendly Game pages aside to compose and ink the above illustration for an art competition. It's around 8.5 x 15 inches, which proves I'm still attached to comic-page-ish dimensions. I actually blew up a doodle from my sketchbook and finished the actual pencilling in Photoshop to print out and ink the final image.

Unfortunately, when I went to get my ink refill at Wal-Greens that I was so excited for in all it's inexpensive glory, I learned that the company stopped refilling the apparently single use cartridges due to "electrical problems". Apparently though, all the different cartridge refill outlets both online and in-person have convinced HP to lower the prices on new ones a bit, as well as advertise about their inks being 65% better than those bargin ones.....Considering a large portion of what I print is going to have black ink drawn over in anyhow, it's not that much of a deterent to find some sort of refill station. The claims that refilled catridges sometimes broke printers howerver.....that's just rotten. I dunno how true they are.

Anyhow, I seem to take longer in inking things that are mine as opposed to inking over someone else. Most of that is the nasty habit of leaving things only kinda-drawn in because "I'm inkin' it, I know what it does, dur dur dur!" Somehow, I still find myself slowing down and questioning things too much though. Which is why it's important to always have that cut-off point of "NO. It's DONE and if you do anymore, you'll mess it up, so don't pick at it." You could work on a page forever and never consider it done.

Reading wise, I finished Stephen King's "Different Seasons" a week or so ago and enjoyed getting multiple good stories. Essentially, the book contains four nouvellas - the awkward middle child of the short story and the novel. They weren't all the level of super-awesome, the final story "The Breathing Method" took a while to get going and get to the meat of the story, but overall really good stories. Of special interest is "Apt Pupil", featuring a creepy kid and a disenchanted old Nazi. Probably not the best summary, but I'm sure you're interesting in finding out more now, right?

Anyhow, scanned the new pages for the start of the book. It will probably be a few weeks before I'm done inking the end of the book and can get to inkin' these new beginning pages, so here's a puppy for you till then: