Something fishy

My inking adventures, part 7

In my quest for ink-able pencils, I found a page of Aquaman. Aquaman is an action hero I remembered vaguely from a long gone past, so my first thought was naturally that this was quite an old page. On closer inspection it turned out to be more recent; DC Comics has decided to polish up some old heroes. One of the artists they asked to work on these new-old hero’s is Ivan Reis.

Ivan Reis was born in São Paulo, Brazil. He started his career at the age of 14 and in 1995, he attracted the attention of Dark Horse Publishing in the United States and appeared in their anthology, Dark Horse Presents.

Ivan became the penciller on a title called Ghost and continued to work on that project until 1996. In 1997, another American comic book company took notice of Ivan. That company was DC Comics. DC put him to work on The Invisibles under its Vertigo imprint.

From 1998 to 2004 he also worked for Marvel, penciling The Thing: Freakshow, Thing & She-Hulk: The Long Night, The Order, Supernaturals, Avengers Icons: Vision, Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Defenders, and Avengers.

But since 2004, Ivan has been an exclusive artist to DC and penciled a lot of titles, including the mini-series Blackest Night, Brightest Day and Aquaman.

Some of his pencils, including the Aquaman page, can be found on his DevianArt page.

The page itself had just enough resolution to be used for inking. I worked on it, again, in Procreate on my iPad Pro. Some while ago I had reset the pressure settings of the Apple Pencil, however, this gave problems to my fingers. For this page, I experimented with a lot more sensitive settings which gave, especially my fingertips more rest.

Also, for a short time, I experimented with other drawing applications, like Sketchbook, Concepts, Sketches, Clip Studio, Inspire Pro, MediBang Paint and Comic Draw. However, most of them did not fit my workflow or could handle the necessary resolution. A few of them I will later return to, to see if I can equal or better results than with Procreate.

So far, the only real problem with Procreate, for me, is that none of the brushes are sufficient for me. Luckily, now the pressure settings are changed, the brushes behave differently, so I will give it another shot. The next release of ProCreate 4.1 should be around the corner and will give hopefully more possibilities.

I was unfamiliar with Ivan Reis work, but I became quickly impressed while inking over the pencils. The attention to detail was great, it looked like Ivan used a lot of reference material what enhanced the overall realism.

The pencils were great, I really liked them. The perfect drawings to put this forgotten hero back on the table. This page was a joy to work on.

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