With my older, more detailed drawings, I used a dry brush and made fine changes with pens but it takes a lot of time and mistakes are painful!
Inking
So, getting back into the swing of things, I've noticed that my inking skills are not what they used to be - not that it was top notch to begin with. I've been looking at tutorials and examples to start work on improving in that regard and I thought asking for artists to share some tips and tricks might help. Artists, how do you ink your drawings?
Thu, 12/29/2016 - 12:06
#3
SvenS
Thu, 12/29/2016 - 11:34
#4
If you work electronically, many vector apps have pressure-controlled, variable-width brushes. You'll need a good tablet, of course. (I recommend Wacom.) Adobe Illustrator has very nice vector brushes of that sort, but if you prefer to avoid Adobe's subscription model, check out Affinity Designer by Serif, available for both Mac and Windows. The app is easily the peer of Illustrator, but much cheaper.
The nice thing about vector apps is that you can edit the line after it is drawn—shape of the line, variance of its width, etc. Some apps also include adjustable smoothing in the event your tablet hand is not as smooth you'd like. (Friction feedback between stylus and surface is, admittedly, missing from electronic tools.)
Thu, 12/29/2016 - 12:04
#5
SvenS
Thanks - I'll look at it. I've been considering moving to digital inking since cleaning up scans takes so much time.
Thu, 12/29/2016 - 18:01
#6
One other advantage of digital inking that I forgot to mention is "resolution independence." Since the apps I mentioned are vector-based, the resulting "ink" can be rasterized at any resolution. If one "paints" with a bitmap app (Photoshop, GIMP, etc.) one might even steal the color layers from the completed art and apply them to a larger ink document. Since the ink lines remain sharp, the "paint" layers can be scaled up quite a bit before becoming blocky, fuzzy or otherwise unusable.
(I referred to color layers in the plural because I find it faster and easier to paint with multiple layers. I might have a dark canvas background layer when painting eyes, teeth and other lighter colors. I typically use the default "transparent" background when painting darker colors. If colors bound each other, I can turn off other layers, then paint quickly. If I get sloppy, erasing the overpaint is easy. It's certainly faster than setting up all kinds of masks, etc.)
You can still rough out a scene in pencil, or other conventional media. Scan the pencil and use that as a template in your vector inking app. No clean up. When the inking is done, shut off or even delete the template layer.
Tue, 03/07/2017 - 09:23
#7
I typically use micronpens since they come in various sizes so my lines can variate depending on which pen i use. I occasionally use a regular pen but not often anymore
I use a regular black ink pen. Try to thicken the line in curves or objects closer to the viewer. just draw a second line and fill inside to make it look like a wider line.
The professional way would be to use a quill head, and control the width of line by the angle of pressure applied on paper.