Digital Inking in Photoshop CS3

July 25th, in General, Review by Craig Randall

Inking is an important part of the process when creating comic books. I thought I’d take time out from my daily chores to practice digital inking skills with this pencilled piece from a book The Art of Comic Book Inking by Gary Martin.

The pencilled art was done by Randy Green and I have to say I appreciate the artist’s in-depth details and pencil shading as it made it very easy for me to know where to ink and how deep/thick the lines should be. I have read reference that sometimes inkers are given a hard time because the pencils are poor or the artist has left the inker with a lot of work to determine light source, thickness of lines and detail. Some artists prefer this it seems as it gives them license to inject their own artistic expertise. In this case the pencils are excellent, simple and a great for the beginner. The pencils are also in blue which is standard as blue will not be picked up by the printers, plus this makes it a lot easier to go over with black.

In the book, four inkers had a go at this particular page using their own particular style and approach to achieve the end result. Unlike the inkers in the book however, I wanted to use digital inking, so using Photoshop CS3 on my MAC OS X 10.5 and an A4 Wacom tablet, I made a start.

The first thing I noticed was the major and annoying problem of not being able to rotate the page. This meant I had to adjust my body quite a lot throughout the inking process which can be frustrating and it was difficult to get a smooth and accurate line. Despite this, I thought the feel of the brush tool was realistic and I was especially comfortable when brushing away from my body at a 45 degree angle.

I started on panel three first as it was an appealing image, small and simple. Using a normal brush tool, point size 8 with pressure tip applied (basically this means that the lighter I press on the tablet pen the lighter my lines are and the harder I press the thicker the lines are).

I was able to discover early on how simple it was, the pencilled lines in this panel were short which allowed me to use simple short strokes. Upon completing this panel, it gave me the satisfaction that (in my own opinion) I did a reasonably decent job which spurred me on to do the next panel.

The forth panel was next and was by far the most fun panel to ink out of the page. I enjoyed inking the full figure of Ghost. The challenging part of this was to get consistent lines on the longer strokes, so it was a case of going over lines to tidy them up.

However a tip for people in digital inking is to work in layers where possible. If you find that you encounter challenging areas like I did with the hair and eyes it is especially helpful to work off a new layer because if you make a mistake or you want to try an alternative method of achieving certain effect, you don’t affect the hard work you have spent hours on. I also did the backgrounds on a separate layer too; this allowed me to experiment without affecting the work on the foreground inking.

However I wouldn’t advise anyone to leave the most unappealing panels until last. If you got several panels on a page, consider inking the more unappealing panels sooner rather than later. This is to keep you motivated right through to the end. So with this in mind I started on panel one and whilst it was easy enough to do, it was also a bit boring due to the lack of detail involved.

In Photoshop there are ‘Line Tools’ which are good to ink straight consistent lines which I used on the pillar to the left of the two characters. Again the background was separate to the foreground characters.

Finally I inked panel two. This was the most challenging for me personally. The toughest part of this to do was the hair and eyes. The eyes are important because that’s one of the first thing readers look at in any panel. So if the eyes don’t look right, then the piece as a whole is very likely going to feel like there is something wrong with it. Consider working on a separate layer again when you’re dealing with eyes.

In total this took me approximately around 5-6 hours. Considering this is my first time at digital inking I thought I did pretty well. Overall, this was a fun page to ink and I was especially satisfied with panel 4 and the background there.

In the book The Art of Comic Book Inking four artist had a go at this particular page and I don’t think there was many differences between the artist’s styles, that’s a token of how well the pencils are drawn and comparing my own work, it’s satisfactory to know that I can at least make my inking similar if not as good as.

Oh and finally, when you’re working, remember to BREATH! Sometimes I’m concentrating on the lines so hard that I’m holding my breath! As Mr Miyagi from the Karate Kid would say ‘Remembaaaaa to breath!! Breath in, breath ouuuuuut!!”

Please leave comments and let me know what you think of my Digital Inking.