Experimenting with Paper and Ink

I’ve been trying some different paper recently, and was reminded that one of the goals of this comic was to experiment. It’s a flexible goal. What does experiment mean? Mostly it was to place curiosity over visual consistency. To not be anchored by past choices.

I’ve been soft on that goal since I started, and this past year with moving the comic to traditional media, I mostly just wanted to make more comics. I wanted to get comfortable with ink and paper, so I stuck to what little I already knew. Although I did experiment a bit with water-colour, before ditching colour entirely, speech bubble shape, panel layout (but not aggressively, not impressively), and even character design.

The recent paper thing has made me interested in creating textures and shapes with tools other than a brush. I suppose it’s an extension of illustrating in black and white. It’s certainly an extension of feeling that it all looks so ordinary. So uniform.

I gotta go make a mess now. Ta.