In my first post I uploaded the clean pencil version of this art and now we have the inked one ready for colouring. Comic book style inking is a very tricky craft, even if it does appear to be nothing more than tracing. It takes a lot of patience and a sure hand because the mistakes are a lot more tricky to fix up than with pencil. Being liquid, ink is also a little more tricky to control than the powdery graphite residue of a pencil. You need to be precise with it and move quickly and fluidly to avoid blots and bleeds.In general there are 2 commonly used approaches to inking in the comic book industry. First is to ink right over the original pencil artwork and then erase the remaining graphite from the page, and the second is to do the ink on a separate overlay, which is either tracing paper or a normal sheet, in which case you need a light box to allow you to see through it. I use a 3rd option as neither of those appeal to me. I treasure my pencil art and don't want ink to ruin it should I make a mistake, and I find it painful keeping an overlay in just the right position for the several hours that it takes to complete an inking project, especially because I do my artwork in sessions in between my other responsibilities as a business owner. What I do is to scan the original pencil artwork and using Adobe Photoshop make a cyan trace template by playing with the channels. I print this "blue plate" and do my inking on that sheet. When it's done I scan that in in RGB and convert the Blue channel to greyscale which after adjusting levels leaves the clean result you see above.
Have a look at the original pencil artwork , and the colourised version.
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2 comments:
Hey Kev,
This is an awesome blog. I didn't know you had actually started it yet. Just a question: What materials do you think are the best to use for inking, an ink pot with paintbrushes and fountain nibs, or technical pens and markers?
Also, I think it would be cool to upload a picture of your blue plate. It's actually the best way of inking in my opinion.
Later,
Brian
Inking tools are really a matter of preference. I tend towards fineliners and markers, but brushes and nib pens have a lot of value and are some times the best way to achieve certain effects. In this day and age is it is possible to "ink" with pencils by pushing up the levels in Photoshop, or to digitally "ink" using a vector based program. A few artists (like the Mad Chris team) are foregoing inking all together and colouring directly over the uncorrected pencils, which can achieve a very striking visual effect in skilled hands.
I will probably examine inking in depth in some future tutorials.
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