One of the dullest and yet something you do multiple times per page job is drawing panel borders.
There’s no right or wrong on any of this, it’s all entirely subjective, and I’d argue all that’s important is consistency (in terms of style rather than say line width)
So panel1 borders (the black lines that go around panels) are a very established part of comics grammar. Even if people don’t really know what they are or contain.
When I started drawing comics, aged 18 – long before I had any chance of a freelance career, I started drawing with Rotring Rapidograph pens. A mechanical pen the draws lines in a fixed width with the caveat you have to hold them in a very particular way (pretty much vertically straight). I used .25 for drawing and 1.4 for lovely thick panel borders. It stood me very well. For a bit.
I inked panel borders like that, using the rapidograph for decades. Until I figured out I could actually get away with drawing the panel borders on computer. Then my process changed, sometime around a decade or more ago… I’d loosely pencil the panel borders, scan the pencils in, draw panel borders in Clip Studio and then convert the pencils to blue line, print the resulting page out – blue line pencils with black panel borders and then just ink! no more panel rules!
Such a relief.
The rapidograph is perfect except… it’s so fiddly… so bloody fiddly. And needs constant care and attention (see the featured image – every time I use it now, I have to wash it out, because the ink dries in it’s channels causing it to block)
After deciding, last year, that I wanted to make a break from the computer a bit (at this point I was pencilling and inking on the computer, and had put away all the tools of the trade) I didn’t want to start up with the rapidograph. I’d added some new tools to my arsenal, namely posca markers – black and white. The black at various thicknesses were great for doing panel borders! nice solid blacks. But a little inconsistent and a bit of a pain to use against a ruler (never a problem with the rapidograph) in exchange they were extremely low maintenance- I mean, open them and they worked – and importantly they were water proof, a thing the rapidograh ink never was, which meant using acrylic white paint to correct mistakes would often result in a smear of grey when the rapidograph ink mixed with the white acrylic. Such a pain.
BUT … the black poscas would often leave ink on the ruler when used and that would inevitably transfer to my arm which would then find its way back to the page, leaving more smears.
Just… ugh. Look my love of digital comes down to just how clean it all is. Ink and me, we never managed to get through a day without clashing with each other and the resulting mess being left on the page somewhere.
The posca ink transfer problem proved insourmantable, so I moved back to the rapidograph, at this point it had spent a good 10 years unused and the ink had gone … very … very bad. It smelt, weirdly, of vanilla. So a thorough cleaning later and the slightly sickly vanilla smell still present at least it worked.
But again the white+black = grey. Gah,
So I moved again to using a rule and a brush – not a bad idea, the brush is almost the perfect tool for inking lines, it’s useable instantly, easy to clean, doesn’t transfer if you’re careful, and you can use standard black ink, so waterproof! Ah, but now the problem is… holding a ruler in the right way to get the line perfect is a pain.
You hold the ruler at about 30-45deg from the page and using the raised edge you draw the brush along it creating a simple smooth line. A bit of practice and this line proves to be both lively, and interesting even when you’re trying to give a perfectly straight dull line.
But it’s still bloody fiddly, and my hand and eye aren’t the steady laser like stillness of my youth, so I think I’m going to have to clean the gunk out of the old inkjet and go back to drawing panel borders on the computer. Nothing else. Just borders. And honestly, I think that might be the right decision.
- Clip Studio calls them frames, I call them panels, and I’ve heard them referred to as Cells. There may be more names, but for simplicity I’ll refer to them as Panels. ↩︎
