More Tony Jaa in 30 Minutes!

My hand can't seem to take more than 20 minutes of detail work. You need feedback from you hand to draw or paint. When my hand goes numb, I can't control my inking and it starts to fall apart. It is the same with drumming, when you can't feel you hand, and speed or finese is lost. So, these were done very quickly. Thankfuly the brush adds personality when my hand shakes or goofs. Pens and quills seem to just look rough and sloppy. This is why I almost always ink with a brush. My sloppy work looks more like a style than a mistake. To further speed things up, I also don't fill in any large black areas when I am inking. That is alll done in Photoshop with the "paintbucket" tool. I also correct any errors, or ink smudges. When you are inking rapidly, blowing constantly on your paper can keep you from ending up with smudged ink on your palm. I read that the early comic book artists inked with a brush because it dried faster than a pen. Speed was the primary concern back then as many 20 page stories were dashed out ver a weekend. The brush inking in comics was a huge influence on me, and it is interesting that it was not an aethetic concern that made that the standard!  Often black and white can look flat or the reader can have trouble dicerning the foreground from the background. Great cartoonists like Milton Caniff or Jaimie Hernandez can do straight black and white without gray tones and pull it off. Not me. My stuff becomes hard to dicern. So I usually add gray tones in Photoshop. If I use dot tones like you see in these Tony Jaa drawings, it is to give it a distict comic book appearance. Most black and white comics use the "zipatone" patterns to give the drawings some depth. Underground comics use these quite a bit and the Japanese manga artists are masters of zipatone. We don't really need to use them anymore as printing of all sorts has gotten much better. I use them simply to give a certan look, so I often make the dots larger than they should really be. The other issue with dot patters is that if your computer monitor's resolution isn't the same as mine, the dots might not appear as dots, but break up into random patterns.