Advanced Inking Techniques, Week 4: Black and White Illustration, Color Lineart

This post has most definitely been brought to you by Heidi Black's entry for the welovefine Marvel Villain t-shirt contest.  Please take a moment and hit 5 for both of her fabulous designs, starting here.

This past weekend's assignment was to create two stand alone illustrations- one designed to be reproduced in black and white, the other a lineart designed for color.  While I haven't had a real chance to color the color lineart yet (I'll have to do so digitally), I did get a chance to make a few corrections pointed out during the critique, and get the images scanned.

Black and white illlustration.

Color illustration.

I'm having so much trouble finding a 'voice' for my own inked illustrations.  I seem to do well enough when inking someone else's stuff, but I'm not really sure what inked direction I want my work to take.  I have things that I do when I'm inking with fude pen, brush pen, and tech pen, but  I've gotten a fair amount of criticism on how I go about inking, so I'm trying to distance myself from that. I grew up with wispy shoujo lineart, which is where my aesthetic takes a lot of its cues, but I've gotten a lot of flack for being too 'manga', so I'm trying to move away from that.  I really like cartoony inks with lots of juicy black placement, but that's too heavy for the style I use as my default style, so I may have to abandon that.  I tend to fall back on techniques I used when I was creating figurework for my intaglio prints, which probably didn't work for me then, and it certainly isn't working for me now.  I'm trying to push storytelling and atmosphere, which results in a lot of drybrush in an attempt to darken the image with a greytone, but that's not working for me either.  I figure this weekend, I'll ink a single illustration a variety of ways as a warmup and to find an inking style that suits my work.  I find all these false notes disheartening, especially in critique, where I'm hearing a lot of the same criticism over and over, even though I'm trying different things, it's just not quite clicking for me yet.