Process Post: Pura Vida Edition

In Liberia, Costa Rica for the next 3 weeks administering an internship program for work. As with other work trips, I’ve brought comics work along, in the hope that I can be productive in my down-time. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t. For the first few days of the program, I’m staying at a hotel (once the students arrive I’ll be staying with a host family for the rest of the program). I’m at the point in the story I’m working on where I need to ink the panel borders. My set up for this is thus:

Note my light source, the room is too dark otherwise:

I’ve been using a Rapidograph for quite a while now to ink panel borders. It’s the orange one (#4), and I just got a new one because I broke the last one I had (I tend to push down really hard on the nib part, and I’ve broken a couple already over the course of the past few years. They are expensive, but I like the width and the blackness of the line. With this Rapido, like the first one I used, the ink flows through it really easily to the point that it will drip out if you let it. The last couple of #4s I had did not do this, so it’s an annoying inconsistency. So anyway I end up smearing ink over a couple of pages before I get the hang of things.

I line it out using a ruler, and because the pen is so runny I use this trick I learned @ CCS where you tape some coins to one side of the ruler (in this case I’ve used Costa Rican colones) so you get a raised surface. This works out, more or less.

The ink flows out pretty thickly, which looks nice, but takes forever to dry. Here the pages are laid out at the mid-way point:

And here they are all finished; it’s going to be a 28-page story, barring any structural catastrophes:

Notes. I finished a sketchbook right before I left for the trip, and started this one:

It’s a 2010 calendar, and I’m using it as a tandem program workbook and sketch/note/work flipbook, the job/program portion of which I’d hoped to fill with Robert Walser-esque scribbles, but so far has mostly come out looking like this:

The comics/’work’ side hasn’t fared much better, I’ve been able to reiterate a few things pertaining to the story I’m working on, as well as some notes I had from last night’s dream:

These are the books I’ve brought along: Essential Latin American Spanish, Ultimate Spanish: Beginner/Intermediate Edition, my watercolor sketchbook, Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, Yuichi Yokoyama’s Ecologue, and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, which I’m already nearly 100 pages into - I just finished the Author’s Foreword, which starts on page 66:

Your intrepid web-logger, age 39, as of yet un-en-Raptured, circa 21.05.11.

It’s pouring rain outside, and has been for quite some time…