Inking space

[xadrian]

I'm getting ready to ink a space scene and I've left the "space" (as in outer) blank because I didn't just want to fill it up with brush/marker strokes, nor did I want to paintbucket it with black later after the scans. Anyone have any tips on how they approach outter space? Stars? I'm sure it's pretty quick, I could digitally do stars over flat black. Any tidbits or quips or annecdotes would be cool.

Thanks.

[Inkthinker]

1. Photoshop is your friend, espescially when it comes to large areas of black. Stars are easy enough, just white dots with the brush tool. If you want more glowy-type stars, use the airbrush tool to create a soft white haze, then add a sharper center with the regular brush.

2. If the final image is going to be in color, then "space" can actually be a dark blue-black Bg with clouds of space gas, nebulae, stars and the like. Not just black with white dots.

3. You may wish to kep a thin white outline around all your characters or ships or whatever, to help break them apart from all that black space around them.

4. If you want to try something REALLY different, make your light souces very harsh and one or two-sided.

[xadrian]

Yeah I've got a high contrast already in place for the ships, I'm just wondering if I could get away with a slightly lighter black (no such thing) or really dark grey or would that be too odd?

I'm thinking of Cam Kennedy's work on Dark Empire where everything was a water color, but the space was almost never solid black, but then I think of a more science and less fiction and have it be solid black with pricks of light.

This is also only for one of the pages, the rest is planetside, but if I like it I'll probably use it for more in later books.

[Inkthinker]

Well, like I said, this is something where Photoshop is your friend, because you can try a bunch of different techniques and see wich one works for you.

[eonprez]

A more traditional method...this would be done on the actual original art and not done in digital production.

I would use liquid frisket and a stiff bristle brush (or toothbrush...that you're not going to use anymore) and splatter the liquid frisket onto your "space" area. then just cover the space area with ink using your regular brush. After the ink is dry take a rubber cement remover (kinda looks like an eraser but is textured). Once the frisket is gone you can touch up your splattering to look more like stars...and less like splattering.

-Brett
EON

[Darren Schwindaman]

what brett said

[SenorSwanky]

Actually, you can dip a nib in white paint or ink and blow downward over the hole in the nib, which splatters the paint/ink through, down onto the page.

[Dash Martin]

Personally, I use a combination of traditional ink splatter's and Photoshop. I made an 11x17 page of various splatters down with a toothbrush and regular black ink. Scanned it in at 1200 dpi and saved the file as a bitmap. Now, whenever something requires a splatter effect, I just convert the splatter file to grayscale, make it a layer, select the background and delete it, and then use the clone tool to clone the splatters from the splatter file onto a layer on the scanned in inked page. It gives more control over the splatters and you don't have to spend forever to mask off stuff. You can just erase unwanted splatters. You can inverse the splatter file and make it white for stars also. Here's an example of a page I did using this technique.



It's a real time saver and it's a lot less messy.

[Bruce Lee]

The toothbrush splatter method works well if you go back in with white out and draw in a few actual existing constellations and star patterns. In Photoshop, I'd just drop in a high quality image of the night sky from a good star gazer's magazine, upping the contrast as necessary.

Loston
http://www.lostonwallace.com