(above) Pencils by Ron Adrian
My 11th job for Jeff was pencilled by Ron Adrian & this was my first effort inking his work. Namor here is surrounded by his female family, friends & loves: Tamara Rahn, Namorita, Sue Richards, & Coral, an obscure, deceased character from SUB-MARINER # 56. I inked it in markers & my new brush. I had been using my Windsor-Newton series 7 size one brush for something like 4 years, even after the ferrule became loose & I repeatedly super- glued it. But I felt that now was the time to retest some brushes that I had put aside that had been determined by me to be inferior yet potentially capable if the need arose to use them. Maybe it's because I have actually developed as an ink artist (or not) but the 3 that I tried were better than I had remembered & I settled on the best of the batch, a Raphael Kolinsky series 8408 (beige tip) size 2. Kolinsky brushes' sizes tend to be larger than W/N brushes so this was like jumping 2 sizes to a W/N size 3 which is what I actually started using in the beginning of my career several years ago. And incidentally, I adapted just fine and immediately hit all of the thick & thin lines that I needed with even less effort than before...hope that it shows in the work. Sorry to bore any non-artists with the tech talk this time around:-) BTW, the client even personally tweaked some pencilling on Tamara in this piece. This commission was finished by 2/12/04.