Inque and Bat in Ink Combat
I know it’s a clunky title but if you say it fast three times in a row it creates a weird, homophonous echo of itself. Anyway, this week’s monster is a slippery villain from the Batman Beyond cartoon named Inque who often shapeshifts her way into deadly conflict with our hero. But this isn’t just an Inque battle. It’s an ink battle. See? Homophonous.
Ink bottles in an ink battle
My go-to ink is Dr PH Martin’s Black Star Matte India Ink. I’ve used some other brands, but I always go back to Black Star because it’s very black and lays down nicely on the paper. I recently picked up a couple bottles of BLINK by Stuart Semple. Blink is an ink he touts as the blackest, mattest black ink available. We decided to test Semple’s creation.
Digital clean-up sketch to prep for lightboxing
In this set up, Inque will be representing the new ink, Blink, and Batman will carry the banner for my standard, Dr Martin’s. There’s a very good chance that the results of this experiment depend greatly on my limited skills as an inker. So take them with a grain of salt.
The Dr Martin’s is glossier, but possibly more rich
After inking each character with its respective ink, it seems like when the lighting is top down, everything looks flat and black. But when you move your view to an angle, and the lights hit the surface of the paper just right, you can see that the Black Star ink has a very noticeable sheen to it that the Blink does not.
The contrast remains even after washing both figures with watercolor. The only downsides to Blink are that it’s literally twice as expensive as my usual ink, and that it’s not quite as black as it purports to be. It felt like it was going down a little thin and, when you really look at it up close, it feels like a second coat in some areas would really shore it up.
Top down lighting and both inks look fine
Again, there are a lot of factors that could affect the outcome of this experiment. My skill level, the fact that the Black Star is a few months old whereas the Blink was an unopened bottle, the paper I’m using, etc. I can’t imagine I’m going to restock my ink drawer with Blink and toss out my Black Star on the basis of one experiment. But it made me want to experiment more and figure out what the best ink workflow for me really is.
You can watch the process video of the Batman Beyond illustration at the link below.