Had a bout of hay fever this morning that disrupted my sleep, so I decided to sleep in an hour instead of getting up to draw. Then I had to go to a school and work on some drums. I got finished with my daily hour of comic work about 20 minutes ago, so I did go through my rehab, just 7 1/2 hours late.

My hand began to hurt again, so I had to find a way to relax and draw accordingly. About halfway through I started to adapt and it didn’t hurt so bad. I started to sketch a bit more with this page, so it looks like I’m not really caring about making it look like page 1 and instead trying to find a way to find a good, satisfactory way of getting across a sketch style while being able to relax while drawing. As a result, I’m inking a bit quicker, but I’m not sure I’m going to like the results much. We’ll see, once I fill in some blacks and add some heavier lines and rendering.

I’ve also been giving thought to my use of a light box. I do my pencils on an 11 x 17 piece of paper, so as to preserve the pencils in case I screw up during the inking process. Unfortunately, the pencils aren’t always clear when I go to ink, which can be both a blessing and a curse.

In the cases when I really like the pencils, I want to follow them as closely as possible, which can be hard to do with a light box… and I have a very high quality light box. On the other hand, not having super-clear pencils can help the inking be more spontaneous.

I’ve tried using a Sharpie to help both solidify the pencils and have the lines come through the bristol board better, but I don’t really like it because a regular Sharpie has a specific line weight to it and, unless I’m going for that particular style, I won’t match that particular line weight when I go to ink, so the drawing will have a different affect.

I should be able to finish page 2 tomorrow, and maybe I’ll be able to do page 3, since technically I only have to ink one panel.