Help Needed: Bluelines or Not? 0

[lemonman6]

I bought some comics from someone recently and they had these 2 art pieces included. The seller told me they’re original and that he bought the Burnham directly from the artist. I’m just not sure if they are copies that were used to ink over or if they include both the pencils and inks. Can someone help verify these? It would be really appreciated. 
 

Sorry for the newbie question. I just want to make sure and learn more about how to ID this stuff. 

[Rick2you2]

They look like copies which the inker inked over.

[Nate Hartz]

Chris Burnham usually inked himself during that period of Batman Inc. He usually blue line pencils the page and finishes it during the inking process. 

The Kubert's usually keep all their original art pages. The only ones that enter the market are usually the inker's 1/3 they get from the artists. I wouldn't know for sure without really looking at the pencils to see if they are printed out blue lines or the originals.

Edited August 12, 2022 by Nate Hartz
fix spelling

[Twanj]

On 8/12/2022 at 12:53 AM, lemonman6 said:

I bought some comics from someone recently and they had these 2 art pieces included. The seller told me they’re original and that he bought the Burnham directly from the artist. I’m just not sure if they are copies that were used to ink over or if they include both the pencils and inks. Can someone help verify these? It would be really appreciated. 
 

Sorry for the newbie question. I just want to make sure and learn more about how to ID this stuff. 

What are the titles and artists?

The second one especially looks like bluelines (which are blue printed out versions of the scanned pencils) but it could also be blue pencils (regular blue color pencil that the artist used by hand).

The Kuberts are repped by https://www.essentialsequential.com/ - you could inquire there or they may have pages from the same series.

[lemonman6]

Thanks a lot guys! Very helpful! 

The Kubert is from Robin Rises and Burnham is from Batman Incorporated. 

I noticed that Burnham does ink his own stuff and so it’s his work regardless. The Kubert piece makes sense that it’s a blue line. I didn’t pay much for these because I somewhat knew they weren’t pencils, so all good.

[Twanj]

If you could contact him directly, hopefully he'd answer. I'm not familiar with either title.

If these are the published pages, that's better.

Since he's both the penciller and inker for the one, it's prolly better. The bluelines look like a rough prelim.

[AndyFish]

Well I speak from experience since I sometimes work on printed out digital blue lines and I've also penciled pages using a blue pencil, while I can't say for certain without seeing them, the top one looks like it's digital blue lines and the bottom one looks blue pencil.

Why?

When we do blue line print outs we're working digitally in the pencil stage-- and while you might begin your pages with some serious roughs you want what prints out to be as clean as possible for the inker (even if that's you) so working digitally it's easy to create a new layer over the roughs (still drawing in blue-- you reduce the opacity of the rough layer) and tighten up the "pencils", then you delete the layer with rough blue lines and you've got a clean set for inking.

WIth the bottom page, the rough lines are all there, as if he was working in blue pencil which is extremely difficult to erase.   Why do creators work in blue line?  1- a lot of us, myself included, use the John Buscema method of building up your drawing from very rough stick figures until it's got mass.  2- the blue lines don't show up in the printing process.  3- Because of #2 you don't have to sit and erase the pencils after everything is inked.

Which leads to the last question nobody asked-- why not just digitally ink too?  A lot of us like the feel of ink on a textured board, and drawing on a tablet often feels like you're drawing on glass.   I use a Cintiq Pro 22 but I've got a clear piece of thin plastic that adheres to the top of it, allowing the digital pen to feel more like you're drawing on paper-- the digital pen also has a variety of nibs to mimic a closer feel to working traditionally, and digital saves time that's for sure-- but then you have no original for the secondary market.

The other benefit to working traditionally is that you don't have the opportunity for endless tweaking which you do with digital, and that doesn't get deadlines met.

hope this helps.