Let's take a break for a little process stuff.
With this issue of Love and Capes, I've started using a Col-Erase pencil to do my layouts. These are colored pencils that are far less waxy and more erasable than the more prevalent Prismacolor pencil. Prismacolor's a fine product, but it's the right tool for the right job.
I'd heard a bunch of my artist friends talk about these pencils, but it wasn't until the inordinately kind Yves Ambrun gave me one to mess around with at New York Comic-Con that I fell in love with it. I found some at Pearl during my Los Angeles trip and have been using them this issue.
The advantage is this: Previously, I'd go through three pieces of tracing paper to make a page of Love and Capes. There would be some really rough pencils, a second more structured drawing, and then the third tight pencils, from which I'd ink the page. But now, I can combine steps one and two into one page. The colored pencils allow me to do a second pass with my standard lead mechanical pencil. I can use the blue as an underdrawing without having to have like colored lines compete.
I think it's keeping a lot more of the energy to my artwork, too. Roughs always have more pop than the tighter pencils, and trying to keep as much of that intact is one of the constant battles of the cartoonist.
Plus, I think the rough pencils look cool this way, too. Like a lot of animation drawings I've seen.