Inking: Black on Black
Working with pen and ink, you often run into the issue of what to do when you have a black element on top of another black element, such as when there is a black figure ...
panel
Kandinsky on comics
I just read through Wassily’s Kandinsky’s book on art theory, Point and Line to Plane (I got this from the Guggenheim online). As the title indicates, in the text Kandinsky meditates on the elements of ...
inking issues: at the border
When using a nib, it is very common to release pressure as you near a border, whether that be a panel border (as shown below) or the contour of a shape. You do this because ...
Panel: top and bottom
Rudolf Arnheim states that in an artistic space, “dynamics [vary] with direction” (30). Or to put it another way, location in a comics panel implies meaning. In the Famous Artists Cartoon Course Lesson 11, the ...
Panel: left to right
The idea that comics have greater clarity when composed with the reading direction in mind tends to be widely understood. Almost all books on comics creation mention this. For instance, addressing English readers, Robyn Chapman ...
Panel: tangents
As I mentioned, I’ve been looking through the old Famous Artists Cartoon Course. Lesson 11 is all about panels and has a lot of solid advice. One thing that is mentioned in that lesson is ...
Panel: shape, context, and content
Does the shape of a panel carry inherent meaning? A square panel seems to imply stability. Its four equal sides create a sense of equilibrium. Rectangular panels imply movement, horizontal for wide panels, vertical for ...