How I Ink my graphic novel.
I’ve been told my Inks look great. Really? Because I don’t Ink anything.
The End.
Adjusting Levels in Photoshop.
No, but really. I tried to Ink my comic pages back in the mid 90′s but whenever I’d go to a convention and show an editor my work they would scratch their head and ask why I was ruining my pencils with screwed up inks. Later I started to focus only on my pencils, my strength, since I could control the lines better then my chicken scratch, blotted, messed up Ink lines.
Years passed and I decided to make a graphic novel and I contemplated inking all over again. I chose not to. To help you understand why I chose not to ink, I need to side step a bit to explain my conclusions.
You see, I work in animation. Back when I started animating for a living, I had a crash course on-the-job training session with a fast approaching deadline. We had to bring on a bunch of experienced Ex-Disney animators to get the job done right and I took the opportunity to ask a bunch of dumb questions. One question was more of a dumb statement that went something like, “Your final drawings are all with pencil and paper? I though you inked on top of transparent cells and painted on the back!”. Chris Sonnenburg, the guy I was talking to, looked at me crazy and said, “What are you crazy? They stopped doing that in the 90′s when computers took over.”
It was a no-brainer after animating for a day with these guys why they don’t use ink anymore. There is just so much more control and flexibility with pencils and it can all be adjusted to look like ink in the computer.
When I started working on my graphic novel it just seemed obvious. Plus my inks suck. Plus it’s another step that takes hours every page. Plus It’s hard for me to make it look anywhere as good as my pencils.
The argument of Inking for the sake of printing is also obsolete in my opinion. Printing gray tones or full color paintings is just as easy as black and white now days. Printing in solid back and white is still cheaper but you can still adjust clean pencils to be black and white by boosting the contrast.
So for example, here’s one of my panels scanned from paper. This is a lower quality jpg so the image is a bit more blurry then my files but it should be good enough for this simple tutorial.
Here’s a closer look to see that it really is pencil. Number 2 pencil, to be exact.
If you select Levels in Photoshop by pressing Command+L (Mac) and whatever for Windows, then you will get this box. It might look different depending on what version of Photoshop you have.
Now pull in the sides until your lines get nice and black without screwing up the edges. If you want to go solid black & white then make sure your lines are nice and sharp as well as making a very high resolution scan.
I keep lots of grays to keep the subtile pencil marks in some places and there you have it.
Now I just need to clean up this crappy drawing. Sometimes my problem with this method is knowing I can fix any pencil lines I don’t like in Photoshop. I end up flying through my final pencils with a bunch of little mistakes to correct later.
The other option is digital inking with a
Cintiq or
Wacom Tablet. I do this with an old comic that I’m slowly redrawing. It’s so easy it makes me question if I should even be drawing with pencils anymore. I just scan my thumbnail into photoshop and then lower the opacity of that layer. Then I make a new layer and with a black round brush tip, I draw my final lines. Instant Pencils and Inks in one easy step. It’s as easy to control as a pencil (especially with a Cintiq) and you can erase it as many times as needed before getting it right.
In the end, I guess it all depends on you. If you like traditional inking or if you’re a
rock star inker then go for it. I just needed to eliminate unnecessary steps (and weaknesses) to speed up my output without sacrificing quality.
That’s my two cents.
I’m right there with you with inking. I was never any good at it and it only took more time. Kind of redundant. Usually I just use Brightness/Contrast, but I’m going to give your levels recipe a whirl.
Cool story about animating and why they don’t use inks.
Yeah, I started out using brightness/contrast but later was introduced to Levels and it has much more control. I think you’ll really like it once you get use to it.
Digital drawing made the inking process somewhat obsolete, but it still serves an important purpose. Depending on the style of your work, simple outlined pencils may not cut it, even if the channels/levels/contrast is beefed up and the line weights are touched up.
If you were doing something similar to a Frank Miller Sin City style of comic, you’d definitely need to apply an inking layer after your pencils are roughed in. The good thing about working digitally is removing the extra step of re-drawing the original image first and applying your ink solids afterwards.
Like you said before, animation never really required solid blacks since the coloring took care of those light/dark values, so inking and placing spot blacks were useless. Personally, I feel in print comics, they’re still needed for definition sometimes. Very few art teams can pull off the colored pencil line work and not have it look like it was overdone in Photoshop (see comics colored in the 90s and early 2000s and you’ll get what I mean.)
Jay – your work isn’t really meant to mimic mainstream comics anyway, so you can pencil and color any way you want. Each spread is meant to be a work of art, and black outline doesn’t exactly work for your style. So long as your look is consistent, I don’t care how you achieve the result – keep doing what you’re doing…
I appreciate what you’ve said here. However I still believe that even with Frank Millers stye it can be drawn with nice pencils and then corrected in PS. The only reason I say this is because I was hired to imitate Frank Miller’s style for some commercial animation years back right after Sin City (the movie) came out. We used the exact same process as with regular animation. Just nice pencil outlines, scanned, Contrasted, then colored black and white in the computer. The end result was probably even cleaner the Miller’s inks.
I still believe the only reason for inking now days is to sell your original work. Or if you love inking. But now that I think of it, having slightly blemished brush strokes might be something you are looking for. It would be hard to reproduce certain aspects of dry brush and stuff with just pencils.
Great points again, Dress. Thanks for the comment!
Hmm… Lot’s to think about.
I guess, I’ve got to admit I still do it the old way. I don’t know why. I guess I like having the originals around for some reason…
(Help I’m trapped in the 90′s and can’t get out!) ;)
sam
Haha. The 90′s was my favorite decade so your trapped in a good place. Originals are a great thing to have too. And like I said, it’s just one man’s opinion, I can think of a few artists that I’d never want to see drop the inking paintbrush. I couldn’t imaging Calvin and Hobbs without it inked.
speaking of animation..especially 2d.i wish they’d go back to the look and feel of the 101 dalmatians, aristocats, sword in the stone etc. wherein they have this really neat sketchy lines effect..i find it really nice to look at because it helps you relate to the time frame of the story..it gives a lot of vitality unlike the really crisp and compact lines of todays 2d animations..for me it feels so mechanical and “advertisingy” seems like the art was made to look that way so that it’ll be easy to make merchandising stuff out of the artstyle after..i don’t know..nowadays i can unfortunately assume that people make cartoons out merchandising characters rather than the other way around..Princess and the Frog was okay.. but if it was done in the style of the 101 dalmatians it would’ve sold a bit more than it has..sorry i think im ranting or something here..
and about inking..yeah it really does depends on the artwork..i think being influenced by mainstream comics gives you that urgency to hand ink your pencils..even if it doesn’t need to be inked at all
I see your point about the mainstream urgency inking. And as far as 2d films, I am in the same boat. I loved the older stuff that wasn’t so tied to marketing. If these studios don’t make any money then it’s not worth it for them to keep making films though so it kinda a catch 22. Where I find the real joy of animation is in some of the new smaller foreign films like “The Triplets of Belleville” and “The Secret of Kells”.
I used to try inking too, and I was told at a portfolio review as well that I was ruining my perfectly good pencils with inks. I got so nervous about screwing up with inks, my hand would shake terribly, and my inking job was all squiggly. Now I just ink everything with the Illustrator brush tool because I still get pressure control, and I can fix up my inking so much easier this way and it comes out smooth no matter how shaky my hand is. (Even on photoshop it gets too squiggly!)
But now looking at this and what you can achieve with pencil, I’m tempted to try that out since I really love drawing with pencils. I never would have believed that your graphic novel wasn’t inked! How amazing!
I guess I still have my inner 90s kid. I get kind of nervous and messy with my pencils and rely on the inking layer a lot, but maybe I can try this again.
I still prefer inking the old-fashioned way. I have tried digital inking and I like it. But IMHO, nothing compares to the feel of a sable brush, Rapidograph, or Hunt 513EF nib moving across a piece of bristol.
I’m sort of the opposite when it comes to pencils versus inks. I usually don’t put too much effort into making my pencils look nice because I know I can always clean it up in ink. I feel far more comfortable with my inking work than just straight pencils. Does that make me weird? It probably makes me weird.
Some of the best artists work that way, in my opinion. Like Bill Watterson of Calvin ‘n Hobbes. I believe Jeff Smith and Doug Tennapel work that way to so you are definitely not weird for being comfortable with that approach. I’m just horrible at inks.