No words yet.  First, another picture...

   I was trying to come up with a bit of an action sequence here, but I didn't realize just how out of practice that I was until I put it all together.  I really ought to be spending a little more time sketching human figures, if I want them to look like humans.

   You might notice that some of the construction lines that I lay down are done in light blue pencil.  This is something that I observed from John Romita Jr back when he contributed to the original Marvel Try-Out Book.  As I've explained to audiences on DeviantART.com, the blue pencil isn't supposed to show up on black-and-white photocopy machines.  However, the modern scanners will show them up if you use the color settings (although I'd like to experiment with a greyscale setting to see if the photocopier effect can be achieved).

   I may ink (and correct some parts of) this and add a little dialogue in the second panel before putting it up on DeviantART.

Once more into the breach!

   This little sketch further illustrates my technique with the blue pencil in constructing an illustration.  In this case, what would've been a cover to one of my webcomics.  The idea was to make a very loose layout placing the figures on the page, and then going back over the figures with a heavier line to get more detail into them.  If I had been working with an inker, I'd have gone over them with full graphite pencils, otherwise I'd have started inking the line art in and then worked details in an embellishment phase.

   I gave the large format scanner (a Brother MFC-6490CW) a go at it, TWAIN importing the scan into an image editor program (Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9) where the histogram adjustment was applied to get more of the lines to stand out.  The image is a little messy, but you should see a little more detail than what would've shown up in the original scan.  The main villain's supposed to be standing over on our right, facing off with the assembled heroes...

   It does raise my questions about the trend in CGI rendering.  There are good examples, granted, but most of it looks like someone's kid is playing with the new toy.  Maybe I'm just showing my age.

   My experience with Paint Shop Pro is that it's a nice, relatively inexpensive alternative to Adobe Photoshop.  I took to it because its interface is much like the earlier versions of Corel Photo-PAINT that I started out using in college.  It's great for working on scanned sketches and line art where I want to avoid the mess of erasing or applying paints or markers.

Some more pages. In swedish.