Digital vs Traditional inks comparison (Patreon)

(Special appearance by longtime patron Seraphina (mommy_sera on Twitter) as the left character, and Chompa on Furaffinity on the right!)

So I wanted to take a bit to try something...

On the left is the result of inking over a scanned sketch in Clip Studio Paint with my tablet (an Intuos Pro PTH-651 that a friend gave me recently), taking advantage of brush stabilization... this overall took me an hour and 45 minutes, which I only I know because I finished Death Becomes Her during the course of these inks.

And on the right is the same sketch, inked with my usual favorite Pilot Precise V5 RT, scanned and run through the Threshold adjustment layer in Photoshop (before any significant cleanup attempts beyond a repositioning of the fingers.) Took about 15 minutes to ink, and 30 seconds to scan and filter. Also pictured is the end stage of my inks on paper - I erase the underlying pencils, so it's really crossing the Rubicon on the piece in question. (I used to use any garbage erasers I had lying around, HIGHLY recommend these hi-polymer erasers, the Pentel ones are buttery smooth and dirt cheap at Target!)

My guiding aesthetic is Don Bluth movie stills, so I work with one single brush thickness - the only variation in line weight comes from the foibles of ink on paper, which I embrace as part of an organic process.

I was feeling a bit paralyzed over my indecision over whether or not to try to "update" my process with CSP, and after finally at least making an attempt at digital inking with this method, I received positive feedback from the patron discord for its cleanliness, but I was pretty unhappy with how sterile it looked and felt.

I talked to Seraphina after doing the digital inks and we agreed it lacked a certain human element my traditional inks had, and while they were open to my trying something different, I knew I wasn't going to be happy with it until I went back for the traditional inks for comparison side by side.

The most striking thing about this was time, though - doing so many sketches lately has helped me get a steadier hand with my pencil & pen work, and as counter-intuitive as it may seem, I get "clean" results in a fraction of the time with traditional media as I do with digital. There have been some projects where I was so sloppy with mytraditional inks, with so many stray lines or outright fuckups, that cleanup took as much as an hour - but that STILL beats the start-to-finish time to ink a full 2-character waist-up piece in CSP. 

The major appeal of CSP for me was the fact that you can convert raster lineart to vector, and use a suite of tools to do things like remove stray lines, simplify lines, etc - but I found myself struggling to get my lines down so painstakingly that I had no need for those tools when I went purely digital. Again, I think this is because of the Don Bluth aesthetic, I want a very specific kind of shape and control to my line curves... but yeah, it just made my brain hurt to imagine doing any further cleanup on future projects drawn this way. (That's not to say I may transition to coloring my cleaned up inks in CSP, that's an experiment for another day)

So I guess until I were to get a Cintiq and it's time to do this test again, I can safely say I'm at my very best with traditional media + digital cleanup.

Let me know if you enjoy this sort of postmortem analysis of my work, I enjoy talking about it though I'm not sure if anybody is interested! I'd be happy to share some more nitty-gritty commentary on my work, it gives me more reminders to save my WIP files for the $2 tier and I like to think that it might be of use to someone.