After a short three page intro to the Blake Monroe story, now it’s time to switch gears. Here is the first page of the second main arc of Variables: 1992. It takes place in Atlanta and involves two detectives who are looking into mysterious break-ins that are plaguing the area. I thought these scenes would bore me but it turns out that I’m enjoying drawing them more than the first three pages (I’m currently working on coloring page five right now), even though very little action is going to occur for a few pages (damn you, exposition!).

For the past few years, I’ve been using a Wacom Graphire Bluetooth tablet to color (and sometimes ink) drawings. Well, today I step into the latest and greatest because an Intuos4 tablet is on its way from Wacom in Seattle. The 512 sensitivity levels of the Graphire work fine for coloring but I want to expand more into digital inking (though not for Variables) and really needed the expanded pressure sensitivity of the Intuos line. Plus, the tablet’s working area is over twice what I had on the Graphire so it will no longer feel as if I’m working in one small corner of the tablet the entire time. It has about a billion shortcut buttons on it that I will be able to load up with important things such as “get me coffee”, “open Google Chrome so I get distracted”, and “roundhouse kick this awful color palette”. More on it next Monday after I get to spend the weekend with the tablet, finishing page five and moving onto page six.

That’s about it for this morning. Click on the image below to see page four in its inked glory.

Page 4 Inks

 

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