Inking Practice

Practice Inking over Ryan Ottley's page from Invincible #83

As something of an interlude from the existential crisis of the past few posts, I spent the night practicing inking.

While thumb-nailing and penciling are mentally intensive, inking is about patience and mood.  If you're willing to put in the time, extraordinary results are pretty easy to achieve.  Start a good CD, audiobook, or podcast, and start cranking.

How to find resources to practice on?

Inking Pencils from the Web

Check out Ryan Ottley's Deviant Art page - he regularly posts pencils from Invincible, among others, that he encourages people to ink over.  He pencils extremely tightly, so you don't have to try and interpret anything, you can just copy if you like.  Or, you can try the same page multiple ways, and attempt to ink in different styles as well.

You can also see some great work-in-progress shots:

INVINCIBLE 112 cover processby Ryan Ottley

Michael Lark and Greg Rucka's "Lazarus" is one of the best comics I've ever read, and recently they held a kind of open competition for the position of Lark's inking assistant.  They give you all the digital files, just as if you were actually working for them.  They are layered out, and easy to print.  http://familycarlyle.tumblr.com/post/90190924284/open-call-for-inking-assistant

Copying Inked Comics

If you really want to understand something about how the guys you admire are inking their work, it's easy enough to scan it and copy it for yourself. You can find black and white inked pages in the back material of many of the trades, anniversary books, art-of books and whatnot, and it's easy enough to scan them and print out your own copies for practice.

Remember, when you finish with your scanning, or pick one of the sources aforementioned, you can print it out in non-reproduction blue quite easily.  Open the image in Photoshop, then go up to the layers menu.  Create a new adjustment layer of the type Hue/Saturation.  Change the Hue to 200, which will bring the whole image into the blues, then change the Saturation to 60, which will make it a light blue, and then change the Lightness to +75, which will make it faint enough to easily be knocked out if you were to re-scan the image.

For more inspiration, watch inker extraordinaire Scott Williams

Notice, when he drops the speed to real-time, how slowly and carefully he works.  Each stroke is deliberate!

Now check out Johnathan Glampion, who has a number of great little films on inking the comics page.