Inking


Inking can be scary- but it can make a piece look wonderful! The key is to take it slow. You can ruin a perfectly beautiful sketch with a terrible inking job. Another thing to be said is to not just trace over all the lines once and call it a done job. As you can see in my inked sketch above, I went over certain lines up to 4 times to give them more of a look of depth. If all your inked lines look perfectly uniform, it results in a very flat looking picture.

Don't worry about where to thicken the lines and not to. In fact, if it looks un-planned, it looks even better. If you want to cheat, you can use a quality brushpen, which will automatically thicken lines itself without you requiring to think. But once again, don't do this unless you are comfortable with using a brushpen and have had experience with them. It is very easy to ruin a picture with brushpens when not used correctly.


Clean Up


Now comes the easiest part of the project- it requires no thinking! Well, I guess it requires a little- one doesn't want to rip the paper. Now that the ink has dried ( make SURE it has dried first ) you can have all the joy of erasing all the pencil lines now! Hopefully, if you didn't use a color-erase pencil, you didn't press too hard with the pencil- because this can actually be more frustrating than you think. Once you have erased away all the stray pencil lines, you should have a nice, crisp, inked line leftover.


Looking Crisp

Well, we are inked and cleaned up. I think it's time to prepare this puppy for Photoshop!

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