...AND NOW I'VE INKED SOMEONE ELSE..!

THERE USED TO be a time when I've discovered in my mis-spent youth that specialists of sorts called inkers treat the drawings of pencil pushers with embellishment. Yeah, we know CHASING AMY movie sequence with fistcuffs resulting from the discussion whether an inker just traces what penciller draws or contributes something more than enhancement for the printing process.

God bless Kevin Smith...

Anyway, I've learned that 'even an inker' has to know at least basics of drawing. Plus, I've grown in [then] Yugoslavia where the very concept of team-work in comics was non-existent at the time.

Years have passed. I've gone through experiences with begging talented friends to allow me to demolish their pencilled drawings with my inking attempts, then I started to learn how to draw [and continue to this day]; tried my hand in coloring and inking AND animating [of course, first I have cleaned thousands of previously used cells for new films to be made], then I drew tons of comics, inked my own pencils and spent 18 years in England going through many jobs, animation and comics drawing included.

Now, in my autumn years I've got a chance to try my hand in professional inking of somebody else's pencil drawings. That 'somebody else' is the gem of Macedonian comics art, Aleksandar Sotirovski [ http://aleksandar-sotirovski.blogspot.com ] who's got a chance to do an urgent job for a comicbook series CARRIE NATION [Dabel Brothers Production, written by C.E. Murphy] since the original artist [whose name simply escapes me at the moment] decided to bow out. Aleksandar's first choice for the inker took his time gentlemanly whilst the deadline turned into a merciless monster...

... so, who do you call in urgent times like these..?
WHY, ME - OF COURSE!

Suffice to say, I've managed to help Aleksandar to make the deadline, pages were colored, probably even lettered [ God, how I passionatelly HATE modern comics with 'mute' pages instead of dialogue balloons and captions as the organic part of images..! ] .

It needs to be stressed that my hands never ever touched Alex's originals; he's emailed me TIFFs [300 dpi] of his pencilled pages, I've loaded them on my trusty Flash memory stick, used the 0-24 photocopy/printing shop in the neighborhood to print the pages on 300 g. smooth cardstock in the lightest imaginable cyan and slosh the black lines and shapes over it. My chosen tools of the trade were Faber Castell PITT markers and also other Faber Castell pens, Ecco pigment. They worked the best. Rapidographs, brush and nib haven't been taken nicelly by the cardstock provided by the shop since they didn't want to accept my own paper. My job was to deliver 5 inked pages in two days - and we've done it on time.

Salut.