I recently completed a pinup for a bootleg Hellboy comic that is being put together by Devon Yeider that has been given the moniker #Oddjobbers. This is another collaborative jam-book where a bunch of super-talented artists and comic-makers are coming together not just to submit their own stories, but also help each other out with the different elements of the comic-making process by picking up inking, lettering or coloring duties where needed. This is going to be a book you're going to want to keep an eye out for so make sure you follow Devon on Instagram: @dev_ill_art.
I was thinking a lot about the different processes involved in comic-making when I was putting this pinup together. I had been using my lighbox lately to ink over pencils on a separate sheet of paper and then doing watercolors directly on top of the inks. As much as I love how the watercolors and inks look together, I was curious if I could "preserve" the ink drawing by using the light box and doing the watercolors on yet another piece of paper and then put all these analog elements together digitally using GIMP Photoeditor and Inkscape.
I scanned both the ink drawing and the watercolors at 600 DPI onto the computer. I imported the ink drawing into Inkscape to turn it into a vector drawing, thereby making it infinitely scaleable and discarding the white background in order to lay it overtop of the watercolors. I saved two versions of that vector line drawing: one in black and the other in red. I opened those files in GIMP as well as the watercolor layer. I adjusted the contrast and curves under the color menu, isolated the wave pattern in the background and duplicated that twice. I laid the isolated waves and the two vector line drawings over the adjusted watercolor scan and slightly offset them. The effect of that, to me, gives the composition more dimensionality that contrasts the flatness well. I also really enjoy that the final compositon just does not exsist. The individual elements making it up exist, but as it is presented and as it will be printed it's in the ether.