Overcoming comic penciling anxiety-at least for personal work......

Let's face it, a lot of folks have a real fear of a blank white piece of Bristol board. Too many erasures, or the wrong layout and you end up wasting what is comparatively and expensive piece of drawing media compared to a piece of paper-but you can't use paper because it simply doesn't hold up to high detai penciling and especially not to inking. Well if you are penciling or inking on your own project I have an easy solution. I started using card stock from the office supply store which has the same weight as bristol board and a nice plate smooth surface. It isn't bristol, but it holds up to penciling and ink well, and even to marker. I've only found it in letter size which means you can pencil manga pages with no problem on it, or if you work in that size for your comics, but I normally use a3 boards which are quite a bit bigger. What I do is separate my panels onto different sheets and then re composite the inked panels in photoshop(you can use any basic image editing program to do this)Sometimes this results in a really fresh and vibrant page and I've found that doing it simply for a change of pace in how I normally work, is sometimes a really good thing, plus 150-200 sheets of this card stock runs about 5 bucks so you can afford to use it like cheap copy paper with no worries about messing a piece up. Plus if you mess a panel up you don't have to trash a page of mess with cutting and pasting cutout panel together. I use messed up chunks to roll tortillons, make paper airplanes, origami, or let my daughter have them for coloring pages! It is available at walmart, staples, office depot, etc. Easy to get and guilt free cheap to use. As I said for self publishing or personal work it's great, if are working for a publisher then you have to of course use their required boards and deal with the heavy anxiety of big blank pages with blue lines, but more about how to deal with that later. All the best! IIId