Piero Tonin: Illustration Animation Cartoons

Still awake? Good! In this page I'm going to illustrate how I draw a cartoon, from early sketches to the final product. Here comes...

Part 2: from sketch to final draft

1 - I start with a very rough layout of the cartoon that is often so scribbly no one on Earth but me can possibly read it. The sole purpose of this very rough sketch is to figure out what needs to go in the panel in order to make the cartoon work. (PIC 1)

2 - Now that I have a clearer idea of what the final cartoon has to look like, I redraw the entire layout on a new piece of paper (21cm X 29,7cm - 8.3" x 11,7" white bond paper) - still quite sketchy, but in the actual size of the finished cartoon (18cm X 18cm - 7" x 7").
In this phase I often find that the words take up more space than I planned, which means that I have to move things around in order to fit everything in.
Once I have everything loosely sketched and in place, I finish the drawing. (PIC 2)

3 - Once the pencil drawing is finished, using a light box, I trace the image on the piece of paper I actually draw the comic on (Fabriano F4) with an HB pencil. (PIC 3)

4 - I can now ink the cartoon.
I work like this:
FIRST - I trace the pencil line with a 0.1 Pigma. (PIC 4)
SECOND - When the ink is completely dry, I erase the pencil line.
THIRD - I go back over the work again and re-ink the whole drawing, making the ink lines thicker and filling in the black areas with waterproof india ink. (PIC 5)
Why don't I simply ink the whole thing first and then erase all the pencil line?
The problem is that while erasing the pencil line after the ink is dry the pigment can be rubbed off to a degree by the eraser, resulting in some lightening of the ink marks. In order to avoid that, I proceed as above, erasing the pencil line before fully inking the drawing.

cartoon

Back to Part 1: tools