LAYERS of the UNDERNEATH

Underneath comic by Nak  

    I love making tiny comics. Drawing them small then BLOWING THEM UP to 8x10 or 11x17 to see the all the textures. My basic train of thought for this particular comic was that I wanted to use Letratone dots. But most of the dot sizes that I had were pretty small - 85 lines per inch - so doing a large rendering and then using the Letratone at that scale would make the dots somewhat imperceptible, so the alternative was to draw small in all the layers then enlarging the art to render the dots visible.

Fig.1 30% tone, 85-line screen  

    I first drew all the panels, then simply started inking inside them - or really - to feel inside of them, if that makes any sense-fig.2   Then I placed a vellum overlay and inked the second color, again in a somewhat random fashion (if that's possible, as I try to retain a balance of knowing and unknowing what I'm doing) fig.3+4.  A third overlay followed along with the tedious task of cutting out the tiny bits of tone - fig.1+4 - and the big question of how all this is going to interact, as well as not even knowing what color everything will be. But really I'm not worried about this... it'll work out!

Fig.2 Main art page                                                     Fig.3 Second color

Fig.4