Inking is perhaps the most challenging part of comic creation. Inking comics is the process of going over the pencil work with ink to clean up and refine the artwork. Some people work with brushes, I use Faber-Castell PITT artist pens. I use primarily the fine and small pen for line work and the brush pen for fills. One of the biggest concerns of inking a page is line consistency. Line consistency is the ability to maintain uniformity of the line. The two main factors in maintaining uniformity are the pens that you use and the confidence with which the stroke is made. A hesitant line is shaky and wavy; a confident line is straight and true. Making a slow careful line will more often not produce the desired results. For inking I go to the Jedi and a quote from Qui Gon Jinn, "Concentrate on the moment. Feel, don't think. Use your instincts." The goal of inking is to maintain the life and energy of the pencil work. Inking is drawing, except for the fact that you are committed to the line you make. It is easy to get lost in all the lines of the image, so it helpful to have someone else review your work. Ink on the page is permanent, and mistakes can test your resolve, but if all fails and you mess up your page you can always redraw. Don't be afraid to destroy your art while moving it forward. Take a chance and you might just make one of those beautiful mistakes that help artist evolve.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Inking: Making Confident Strokes
Inking is perhaps the most challenging part of comic creation. Inking comics is the process of going over the pencil work with ink to clean up and refine the artwork. Some people work with brushes, I use Faber-Castell PITT artist pens. I use primarily the fine and small pen for line work and the brush pen for fills. One of the biggest concerns of inking a page is line consistency. Line consistency is the ability to maintain uniformity of the line. The two main factors in maintaining uniformity are the pens that you use and the confidence with which the stroke is made. A hesitant line is shaky and wavy; a confident line is straight and true. Making a slow careful line will more often not produce the desired results. For inking I go to the Jedi and a quote from Qui Gon Jinn, "Concentrate on the moment. Feel, don't think. Use your instincts." The goal of inking is to maintain the life and energy of the pencil work. Inking is drawing, except for the fact that you are committed to the line you make. It is easy to get lost in all the lines of the image, so it helpful to have someone else review your work. Ink on the page is permanent, and mistakes can test your resolve, but if all fails and you mess up your page you can always redraw. Don't be afraid to destroy your art while moving it forward. Take a chance and you might just make one of those beautiful mistakes that help artist evolve.
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Oh man, Inking, I could go on and on about it! Frank Miller interviewed Will Eisner about inking and that's some good reading. I know some cartoonists have a sort of Zen approach and will not ink a line until they feel it wants to be inked (Dave Stevens worked that way) Others approach it in a hard core workman like fashion. It does sort of boil down to confidence. However the idea of not being able to change the inks or that they are immutable I disagree with. Illustrators like Flagg, Gibson, Booth, regularly changed their inked work. John K. Snyder3 does almost as much with white ink/paint as with ink. In a way it's quite freeing to work black on white then white on black, back and forth like a focus wheel, until you find/get the image you want to see. Not only for corrections, but for effect, texture and just plain drawing.
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