so I finished page 5, and I’m not unhappy per se. However, I don’t know what to do about shading. Thing is, I want to do lots of contour lines, and hatching, but I’m finding that swaths of streamlined inks are not only more shadowy, but do have something going for them in terms of looks. As well, there’s this one part of the process that I need to let go of: where *not* to shade.

See, inking looks great because it’s the contrast of black ink on white paper. We get this with our eyes a lot, like how colors are “opposites”: red/green, orange/blue, yellow/purple. However, with Black & White it’s deeper, more stark, and just works. I’ve looked at pages of inks and just stared for a long time, because they’re well crafted and because there’s so much going on in my eye when I look at them.

An example: stripes. Black bars on a white field. Look at them. Or at a chessboard that’s black & white. Hatches of even size, spaced apart, are the same thing, and that’s the effect of inking. Good inking does this.

However, if I’m going to draw a face, especially a female face, I want to leave off too many lines. I want a nice nose, some eyes, eyebrows, and frame it with some hair or whatever. Anyway, I won’t be filling in the face with lots of scribbles; if I do add lines, they’ll be contours, or shading, but I want to keep it clean.

So when I was doing page 5, I found that the walls of the middle panel were just killing me: I wanted to do texture, but I didn’t keep it as smooth as I’d wanted.

Boy do I need help with my city street scenes. I just don’t do them, y’know? Not my thing, normally; at least, I never wanted to do an object before. Props, they’re called. I need to practice with my sketch book.