#fishandquips

Hello again!

Here I am, a quarter of a way done and one and half pages away from finishing the prologue of Fish and Quips.

I am enjoying the challenge a lot, because I am getting TONS done. For instance, on day 24 I came back home from work at ten at night and I was knackered, but if I miss a day I fail, right? And so, I ate a piece of toast for tea, got my half hour of penciling done and went to sleep. On day 23 I spent the day out, and suddenly realized that I didn’t have the paper to draw my comic. I decided to get my sketchbook out and I worked on character design instead of pages. Had I not been doing this challenge, I would have just shrugged my shoulders and written those days off as days when it was impossible to get any comic stuff done.

In short, I’ve never been this consistent with comics in my life!

And now here’s my 3x3 grid:

I have been happy about my character’s facial expressions. I have been unhappy with the fact that the pages have no colour. My focus for the next 9 days is to find a sustainable way to add some colour to the pages. If anyone has any ideas on how to do that as a traditional artist, I would welcome any suggestions.

Thanks for reading and see you in 9 days!

Hello everybody,

These past 9 days I have been through a bit of a struggle with my current inking tool: the gpen. Suddenly, the ink wasn’t flowing anymore and I didn’t know why. After my 30 daily minutes drawing Fish and Quips I spent some time researching and testing stuff during days 16, 17 and 18 to make the g pen work and, as a result… I forgot to take a picture of the work I did those days. If you are interested to know the solutions I found check under the 3x3 3x2 progress grid!

I have been happy with my new character design, I love drawing Sam. What I haven’t been too happy about is the story flow, that will be my target to improve for the next 9 days.

And now, I will talk about my G PEN PROBLEMS!

When I realized my new nibs weren't working properly, the first thing I did was google “ How do I make the ink flow better in my g pen nib?”. I found a collection of answers, this being one of the best ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8UZlaMxsQ8

Basically, the problem is a substance that covers the nib to prevent the nib from rusting. This substance coats the nib and makes ink slide down slower. I looked into it and found 3 ways of destroying this substance in order to make the ink slide better down the nib. I approched this scientifically, I grabbed 3 new nibs and tested all three methods. Here’s what I found:

Use alcohol (the 99% type you find in the pharmacy) to clean the nib. I tried, and it just didn’t work. I don’t know if I am supposed to scrub harder. But it just did not do anything. What I found out however, is that it is great to clean the nib after an inking session. So I am doing that from now on.

Use acetone (AKA nail varnish remover), this one, if you scrub well with a cotton bud works pretty well, far better than alcohol!

Use fire! I initially used a lighter, and held the nib on the flame for a second or two. It didn’t do anything. Then, I held it in the fire for longer, until it went slightly brown (not red hot)  and… TA-DA! It worked, the ink flowed freely. It works better than the acetone. However, some sources claim that the fire affects the curvature of the steel, thus destroying the nib. I haven’t notice the difference, but I will keep an eye on the acetone and burnt nibs and see if there are any differences. I will let you know if there are.

Long story short, fire works! I will make a further update if I find out that fire destroys or changes anything on the long run.

Until then, I bid thee farewell!