Hi Xulia! I just stumbled upon your art and lemme tell you, it was love at first sight 💘💘 Those colors, that line weight, that style! I’ve been messing around with ink lately but I just can’t express proper shapes or shades with just a few abstract strokes and it ocurred to me if could you give us some tips on line weight and stuff like that? I would really appreciate it 😄😄

takitakos:

Hi, and woah, thanks a lot!! Ok so I feel a bit weird answering this because I feel I’m still really clumsy with my inks, and I can’t fully make the brush do what I want it to do (my pulse is… irregular haha…), but I guess I can share some close ups of what I’ve been inking and say a few things about it… Don’t take this as advice tho, just me sharing how I try to draw.

So I have a technical issue: I keep my ink cartridge on, the tip of the brush is overflooded with ink and I can’t work properly, so I have to take it out, work, and when it’s getting dry, put the cartridge on again. This has become part of my method, and you can see it here: with the brush on full power, I draw the close figures, the panel lines and fill black masses. The lines are clear and strong, but also harder to control (I fuck up a lot). Then when it dries out, I draw the stuff that’s further from the eye, caring less and less for detail as it goes away, fading.

Another thing I do a lot is shamelessly cut the lines from further stuff before they hit the object in the front. Can help with depth. Also, I wish I was as brave with black masses as Mike Mignola is, but I do try to ink casted shadows from body parts or clothes, they help a lot make your figures feel volumetric.

A bit more on black masses: they add weight to the drawing and are super important for composition. And well, can help solve fuck ups :’) use them! More things: add detail to close terms, just scribble what’s far away. Keep it simple but clear, you still need to understand what’s happening back there (I struggle with this a lot). Another thing I’m doing a lot in these pages is playing with textures on clothes, furniture, etc. to help me with composition and separating things from each other to bring up the whole thing.

I stress a lot with my inks because I don’t feel in control of what I’m doing. I’m not as precise as those pro inkers that upload videos drawing with their brushes without getting a line out. But I have realised I’m capable of the best (and worst) when I stop caring too much and just dive into it shamelessly. So let’s afford the worst and fix it in PS later 😉 stop stressing and go for those fresh lines.

Don’t know if this can be helpful but hope at least it was interesting. Thanks for those nice words!