Tips on Inking a Drawing

[Mitch after Midnight]

Hey everyone,

lately I have been making a lot of art, both for myself and for people who request it, but I personally haven't been all too happy with it. They seem to lack a certain 'oomf', if you follow me.
So I tried switching from my sketchy style, which I found a bit sloppy, to a style where I tried keeping the line art out of the picture altogether and focus more on shading and colouring, but I feel it's not really there yet. An example can be seen here http://animeotk.com/gallery/showphot...ryu152/cat/500

So I started trying out a more crisp style, with inked lines, however, I can't for the life of me figure out how to make it look good. I have tried Photoshop, Illustrator and Manga Studio 5.0, but nothing really seems to do the trick.

Can anybody give any advice on what to do? Maybe someone knows some helpful tutorials? Anything would help!

[februaryleaf]

Fastest and best looking way to Ink is to do it traditionally on paper.
If that's not an option, there are 3 solutions I know of.

1. Get a program that has brush stabilizer. With it you can draw very clean lines. There are two programs I know of that can do this: Paint tool Sai and Krita. Krita is free, and I have been using it as my main drawing program for a year or so. (google for instructions on how to turn the stabilizer feature on.)

2. If you don't have brush stabilizer in your program, you can get clean lines by zooming very close, even to level where you can see invidual pixels. But inking this way is extremely slow.

3. Use paths (vectors). You can do this with paths tool in Photoshop. Or with programs like Illustrator or Inkscape. I hate this method because vectors create flawless mathematical lines and result is dull and lifeless finish. But it works for some people.

[Mitch after Midnight]

Thank you for your reply, februaryleaf

I see what you mean yeah. I have tried using Illustrator, but that doesn't really give the authentic pen strokes that you'd expect.

I will try out that Krita thing you mentioned. I have tried Manga Studio, which has some sort of brush stabilizer, but it didn't really do the trick for me, so I hope Krita does ^^

Thank you for your help!

[elmantonegro]

As frebruaryleaf said: Fastest and best looking way to Ink is to do it traditionally on paper. If that's not an option…

I do my inking in the traditional way, pen and paper, but some of my process might be what you are looking for, after I pass the image for the scanner the line isn’t exactly black and it has a lot of noise from the paper so use the tonal curve (curves in phoshop) sorry I can’t tell you where is it because my photoshop is the Spanish version, I pres control+m so the idea is that if you pull the line up the ligter pixels will tend to white if you pull the line down the darker pixels will tend to black if make two points and make the curve almost a vertical line you will have a black and white lines with no shades of gray, playing with this you also can get different thickness on the lines… or

If you have Ilustrator you can vectorize your draw then you can improve the lines on Ilustrator then export to photoshop for the coloring.

I use a software named Vector Magic, is more accurate than Illustrator or Corel Draw and the results are fantastic, example: http://animeotk.com/gallery/showphot...versio/cat/514

You can not deny the results… from the scanner to Corel Photopaint to Vector Magic and finish on Corel Draw, yes the final image is a vector based image

Final tip: draw big publish small, I work my images in 3000x2000 pixels format and publish them in 900x600 pixels, the reduction have a great impact on the sharpness and edges on the image giving the illusion of well integrated image.

If you are confused, I made my job right… I mean you can ask what ever you want but not by PM, keep it public if someone else find this information helpful.

Yours: El Manto Negro.