May 2010

My cartoonist friend, Rina Piccolo has revamped her web site and launched a new web comic, Velia Dear. It’s nice to see her flexing her narrative muscles in a format that is more liberating than the newspaper strip (she does Tina’s Groove and is the funniest Six Chix cartoonist)

Fantastic! You couldn't get away with this in the newspapers

The cartoonist nerd in me also enjoys her blog posts about the cartooning process itself. This piece on ink washes (too scary for me, as yet!):

For those of you who may not know what an ink wash is — it’s just water
with a teeny bit of ink in it. When applied with a brush on paper, it appears grey. The more ink in the water, the darker the grey. You can play around with it to give all kinds of nice tones to a line drawing. This is how my webcomic “Velia, Dear” gets it’s tones, which are called “half-tones”.
If you can master the wash –I’m still learning, but I’m a lot more confident with it than I was a year ago — you can use it to create mood in a cartoon or illustration (some cartoonists prefer to use cross-hatching instead) — it’s a preference. However, I should add that newspaper comics rarely have a wash because of how they’re printed. Am I going off on a tangent here?
Anyway, the ink wash is a ton of fun when you get confident with it.

I look forward to her answer on where she gets her ideas from. It’s got to be good, ‘cos she’s sure got a lot of them.