3dflashworld


Another thing to remember when inking is, if you are going to CG your artwork, don't color a whole lot of black with the pen itself. Save the shading for your graphics program, after all that is why you spent the money you did on it or why you spent the time you did looking for a crack for it cough cough

Inking:Usually people ink lineart so that they can scan it in and color it with a graphics program or because they are making a comic or manga. Usually when making a manga though you would do shading when inking instead of just using lines or you might use comic tones. Another thing to keep in mind is when you are inking, use line width variation to show where the light is comming from. The lines getting more direct light will be thinner than the side of the object getting little or no light. Also, the outline is usually thicker than the detail lines on the object. When doing lines to define muscles or small details on clothing or seperate strands of hair, use a thin pen. You can get much finer lines and its very boring looking when you have a picture with all one solid line width.

	Ok, one of the worst things to try to do is inking sloppy pencils. So, once you have gotten your drawing all sketched out start cleaning it up. I usually use a kneaded eraser or a white nylon eraser. You can get either of these at any art store and at some.

Now carefully go over the pencil lines with a black, permanent pen or if for some reason you want a different color use that color pen. Sometimes i trace over the pencils on a seperate piece of paper incase i mess up. You can use a light-table, tracing paper, or hold it on a window, any of those make tracing easier. Once you have all the lines done at one weight/width go back and make some changes in the line width. Be smart about where you put changes in width, its not just chosen at random. I gave some examples of where to vary line width in the intro to inking paragraph at the top of the page.

Ok, now scan you picutre in, experiment with scanner settings so that you can get somewhat of a white background instead of a yellowish-brown color. Usually leaving the scanner at the default settings is fine. If you dont have a scanner you can go to any Kinkos and use one of theirs, just bring a floppy disk to put your picture on once you've scanned it in. The chances are now that you've scanned your pic in it has some fuzz around the lines and edges, but dont worry because its easy to fix with photoshop.

	Open up the pic in photoshop and go to Image > Adjust > Brightness/Contrast... and turn both the brightness and contrast up a little bit. Another thing you can do is adjust the levels to get a cleaner looking picture. Press ctrl+m and make it shape like a smoothed out S. Tweak that a little bit and you can get the same effect or a better one. Sometimes i use both.

Preparing yor lineart for coloring: Ok once you have it all cleaned up how you want it go to the channels tab in the layers panel. Then right click on the bottom channel (it should be blue) and duplicate the channel. Now click on the blue duplicate channel and press ctrl+i to invert the colors and you should have a negative of the lineart. Then Click on the layer tab again and make a new layer. Go to Select > Load Selection > and once the box pops up go to the channels box and select the "Blue Copy" channel. Now fill the selection with black. You have you lineart on a transparent layer so when you color it you dont get white "jaggies."

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