Very nice Mal...love the use of grey tones...that's something I might try someday...

JT...beautiful coloring as usual...

Didier...can't see the picture at work (blocked by the firewall) but I'm sure it's something quite nice...will have a look at it tonight.

I finally got around to inking this.  Scanned on the laptop because the confounded PC went tits up on me again.

I worked this on through with a series of different inking methods just to see which one looked better.  Most of the black areas on my heroine's costume on the left-hand panel were done using a PITT brush-marker; large parts on the right were done using a Winsor-Newton red sable #2 brush dipped in Pelikan India ink.  I'm leaning towards the latter, as the PITT markers are a bit lighter.

One more thing: I can see what JB is talking about on some of his commission postings about the more recent PITT brush-tips being of poor quality.  I really tore that thing apart just for the little space that I was laying down.  One more reason to dust off the old sable brushes.

I have never experimented with blue pencils myself...I prefer the good ol' mechanical pencil...but I can understand why some of the pros use them.

   Interesting suggestion, William.  I might try and seek out a similar command in Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9.  Otherwise, I'm also considering setting my next scan of this piece (now cleaned up a bit with eraser and white acrylic paint) to black-and-white or greyscale 600 dpi to see what the result will be.

   Senastien, when Marvel Try-Out Book volume one came out, they were still using the old photographic machine used in newspaper printing, so any of the blue pencil lines which remained on the page would probably not have transferred over to the photocopies being made.  More recently, with color scanning technology and software, that advantage to using blue pencil has been neutralized.  Hence my seeking a means of setting scans to "miss" blue pencil marks.

Aaand, with no further ado...

   I actually followed up on William's suggestion and found a color replacer function within PSP9 on the toolbar.  Just Ctrl-leftclick the color you're replacing and Ctrl-rightclick the one you'll be replacing it with (in my case, left clicking the smudge or leftover pencil line as the foreground color and right clicking the white space as the background), and paint away.  Done using a wireless mobile mouse I just brought at the local Borders Books & Music coffee shop.

Since I got home, I went on this kick with the MFC-6490 CW scanner.  I just had to bring up a few more from my scrap drawer...

Back in '97 and '98, I was in the midst of a serious fan-fiction kick.  This was an (incomplete) character design sheet using some of the X-books characters for what had turned into an abortive effort for me.  It's probably just as well, as several of them were quite OOC ("out-of-character," in fanfic-speak).

l.-r.: Wolverine, Jubilee, (partially penciled: M, Husk, and Shadowcat)

An original character sketched up during a day off from an old job...

And, finally, a 4-page thumbnail series of what would've been a big fight scene in one of my comicbooks.

The sequence of the action would gone like this:

PAGE ONE

   Kid Fury takes on Panzer and has him on the ropes, until his partner Aqua intervenes and hydrokinetically slams a poolfull of water on her.

PAGE TWO

   As Kid Fury starts to drown, Panzer is gloating but something smashes through the ball of water entrapping her and splatters it, getting Panzer wet and stunning Aqua, whose concentration on maintaining the water prison was broken.  KF opens her eyes and finds herself in the arms of her teammate, Sidewinder.

PAGE THREE

   The other villains, Mindbender and Concentric Man, have Mandragore and Powerhouse on the ropes with a double-team psionic attack when Kinetik and Shakti arrive on the scene.  Mindbender turns his attention to the heroines, but Shakti puts herself between him and the others, taking the brunt of the psi-attacks.

PAGE FOUR

   When he doesn't see Shakti buckling under his psi-blasts, Mindbender ramps it up but that proves his undoing, as she is able to absorb all of the energy from his attacks and converts it into a blast of tiny biokinetic bubbles which pushes him into his partner Concentric Man with enough force to knock them both out.