Here are some more inked comic drawings. I am really getting to be comfortable doing these comic drawings with a brush and ink. If you are following my progress along, I hope you are enjoying these posts.

Click on any of the pictures to see enlarged versions of the pictures.

Inking on Bristol pages require concentration. You should plan your inking to move around working from left to right ( assuming you are right handed ). Also, it’s good to work from top to bottom, for the same reason. You can easily drag your palm or little finger etc. across prior wet ink. I smeared the drawing of Pogo above because I didn’t allow the ink in a section long enough time to dry. When it happens, I try not to panic. Most times, I just move on trying to be more careful and I plan to fix the smear using white watercolor paint. ( I use a product called “Deleter White 2” other products I have used are “Pro White” and Dr Ph Martin’s “Bleed Proof White” ) Before applying a white paint correction, you should be sure that all the inking is dry . Also, be sure to let your white paint correction dry totally before trying to do any work over the correction. It sometimes is useful to apply the white paint in thin layers and then allow it to dry between adding on more thin white paint layers. Sometimes it is useful to thin the white paint with a little water. Getting too thick a coat of white paint can get in the way of any additional India black inking. Your goal is to not be thicker than the original Bristol board surface. So thin corrections are what you are trying to achieve. If you look closely at the drawing of Pogo’s head fur you may see a slight correction but it is almost invisible. Practice makes for perfection.

In the picture above, there are some of the tools that I used on these drawings. I am not inking directly on top of my pencil sketching on the Bristol board, I do the pencil drawings on regular bond drawing paper and then place the bond drawing paper under my Bristol board. I use a light pad to shine through the drawing and the Bristol board. It keeps the Bristol clean and there is nothing to erase after the inking. The drawing paper can be erased or reworked until I am satisfied with the under drawing and the light pad then allows me to ink on a clean sheet of Bristol. Walt Kelly used to under draw directly on Bristol with light blue pencils and then brush ink right over the sketching. The light blue didn’t have to be erased because it didn’t show when the comic was photographed for printing. But that was in the 50’s , 60’s and early 1970’s. Today in 2026, light pads for working on multiple layers is much easier and lets you set up the under drawings below the Bristol. I have seen some artists scanning the pencil drawings into software like Photoshop and converting the drawings to blue and then printing the blue drawing on to Bristol to be inked. But I find my light pad approach easy and doesn’t require software or a computer printer etc.

I am still using both a watercolor brush and India ink as well as several Kuretake brush pens. I recently tried using 140 # Cold Press watercolor paper instead of Bristol paper and it worked fine for this method. I want to use standard watercolor paints to color some of my inked drawings. If I like them, I’ll post some in the future.

I keep thinking that it would be fun to color these, but I really love the black and white look of brushed India ink.

As I said earlier, I am getting very comfortable creating the drawings based on Walt Kelly’s comic Pogo. It helps me to focus on the inking techniques by following his style. There is so much to learn from that great master cartoonist. As I said before, it was such a shame that Walt Kelly’s work wasn’t recorded for future artists. There was so much lost in the translation.

These style inking comics look wonderfully solid.

Tips : A few other tips that I use are a white cotton glove on my inking hand to prevent body moisture from getting on the inking drawing page. I cut off the end tips off all the fingers and the thumb of the cotton glove all except the little finger. You can always purchase special artist drawing gloves, but plain white cotton gloves work well too. I also use low tack masking tape (1/2″ to 1″ wide) to attach my bond drawing paper to the bottom of my Bristol board. Four small length pieces about an inch long placed on four edges help them stay together and not slide around when you are turning your board while inking over the light pad. I also lower my external drawing board lighting lamp when I am working on my light pad as it helps me to see the under drawing better on the Bristol board.

Readers Note : My total focus is on learning and practice. In all cases for these postings there is no intent to use any artistic material from Walt Kelly’s work or style as anything other than as inspiration. “Inspired by Walt Kelly” or “In the style of Walt Kelly”