More Inking Practice

The Art of Comic Book Inking by Gary Martin with Steve Rude

When I finally get around to a full rundown of inking and the books on inking, I'll get more in depth about this volume, but right now the focus is on the specific practice of inking - a skill that is easy to underestimate.  For those of us who are used to simply rendering with pencil, there is an art (no pun intended) to creating dimensionality and clarity with only black and white.  Your options range from careful crosshatching, (most common to american comic books) to the simplicity of fluctuating line widths and spotted blacks. (Jeff Smith's Bone, for example), or from super clean lines like Burns' Black Hole, or Blutch's drybrushes.

Either way, the basis for all inking is control - even the most uncontrolled masters merely make it look that way.  In his book, Gary Martin says it took about 3 years to start to feel like he could really control his brushwork.  And in the section on Getting Started he reproduces some feathered lines for practice.

"Practice them over and over again until you're sick of doing them - then do some more!"

The nice thing about these is, you can print them out and copy them, so that even if you're not in the middle of an inking project currently, you can at least make yourself do 10 minutes of practice every day.  You can also use them to practice inking on the tablet, or warm yourself up before tackling your next page.

Here is an inking practice from a couple of weeks ago

And here is a page I made today:

I encourage you to check out the book, and then just print out a bunch of scans of his practice lines, in light grey, and copy them as exactly as you can.  Go slow, and do as good and as patient of a job as you can.  The results might surprise you.