Method to The Madness (part 2)

After the initial drawing has been finished in blue pencil, we start the inking. Our style of drawing leaves a lot of room for interpretation at this stage, and quite often we add in extra detail and small design elements while working as we progress. There is no specific side that we start on and it usually comes down to personal preference. On this piece I started with the dog on the left hand side, as I thought this would be particularly challenging. We very rarely use a brush and prefer to work with varying sizes of Faber Castel black art pens.   

Any small errors are corrected with Tipex and then re-inked.  On occasion, large areas need to be re-worked, either when we change our minds about the composition, or when the inking is not quite right. The way in which we deal with this is to patch in clean paper by taping a blank sheet to the back of the artwork, cutting through both sheets with a sharp blade, and then replacing the cut-out section of the artwork with the new piece beneath it. When the new area is re-drawn and re-inked, it is almost indistinguishable from the surrounding area. On this particular drawing, no patching was necessary.

In part three we will look at the final inked artwork and how it is prepared for print.