The Sketchbook from Heaven is fading fast. I only have a couple of blank pages left as of this writing. I’ll soon be moving on to the sketchbook I cleaved in two in order to approximate the aspect ratio of my soon-to-be completed pad. Hopefully the new sketchbook will be as good to me as the cheap one which was dumped into Target stores during Christmas as a “one-shot deal” never to be seen again.
Doodles of a vermin man
I plan to work some of these ideas into a short comic using the same black and white technique. I’ve been rifling through my flat file cabinet snatching out scraps of various papers to see what may have a look and, most importantly, the feel of the cheap sketchbook paper. I was also hoping to find something that would not wrinkle as much when the water is applied and something that would yield a richer black. I played around with some vellum bristol, Arches hot-press water color paper and some Blue Line paper which has light blue, comic-book layout rules printed on them. The vellum bristol was awful and sadly I have a whole pad of it. The Arches paper was surprisingly disappointing. The lines looked soft on it. The best of the lot was the Blue Line paper which is actually Strathmore 400 Series bristol paper. I think I bought it from Fat Jack’s Comic Crypt quite a while back and used it for the fire safety comic Hot Topics. I scrounged up 10 unused sheets of it which I will use for my new opus.
Ultimately what I am hoping to do is work up a comic in a fashion similar to what I’ve been doing in my soon to be depleted sketchbook. I want to have fun working on it in a relaxed, informal way having the sketches lead to a sequential story. I’ll chip away at a short story in front of the TV, on the dining room table or wherever I feel comfortable. I’ll still scan the pages into the computer to do layout and lettering, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Right now I want to have fun.
White Heat — a pyrokinetic character from a story separate from The Atomic Warrior which I am kicking around
Sad when you find a good one and it goes away… sigh
It’s weird. As I said before, I would have ignored it if I saw it on the shelves of a store, But Tina snagged it, and I don’t think I’ve had a sketchbook I’ve enjoyed as much. My quest is to find a replacement.