Sounds cool. I'll try to uphold my end.
I strongly recommend watching one of the 10-minute
Proko anatomy videos every day until you make it through them all. It WILL overwhelm, but any little bit that sticks will help to inform how you run your lines along the form. That's really the key --- especially in pen and ink --- knowledge of anatomy helps guide your decisions on what to mark...not just what your eye sees on the surface or the lighting shows. Those marks then hint to the observer the underlying 3D shape.
What I admire about Malan (above) is his decision making along those lines. Remember this is not hyper-realistic painting...this is
line-art. It has it's own (very, very, difficult) atheistic to master which can quickly degenerate into pure cartoonish-ness if you let it (or if that's your intent).
This is why I say folks like Trampier were
extremely talented artists---he was not operating in "easy" mode by any means. Much less difficult styles to start off with are (to my thinking)
(a) anime-style cartoon-isms
(b) generic color/rendered digital painting
Most modern comics and graphic novels are now using a blend of these two approaches. The artist draws very minimal lines (likely digitally) and then the colorist heavily paints them (compared to the flat-colors of yesteryear). The colorist is now carrying a lot more of the load for making things look three dimensional---because the printing process can handle it and digitally it's quite a bit easier than it used to be.
The veteran comic artist Alex Ross just finished a Fantastic Four comic in which he, an innovator in traditionally PAINTING comics, attempts to draw and ink in the old-school fashion..also applying a very limited color palette (without blending). It's almost like he dared himself to see if he would have been capable of surviving in the industry of a by-gone era (1960's).
Compare the line-art results to the painted work (almost no lines!) he is famous for
Creating half-tones (greys) and soft-edges with line-art is tricky---but it's that delicate hatching and line-wight variation that makes it so beautiful to my eye.
