Principles of inking

Inking in the world of non-digital tools is the process of using pens or brushes and black India ink to finalize pencil lines and make them ready for toning or coloring. The printing presses back in the early days of comics weren’t capable of printing grayscale, so dark black ink lines were needed to reproduce the comic art.

In the digital world, we aren’t restricted to simply black ink for our lines, and we have a multitude of tools we can use to make our finalized lines. There is an art to good inking that we should discuss briefly.

Inking is the art of taking a rough pencil sketch and providing finalized edges, volume, and a sense of light and shadow. To see this process in action, let’s take a look at an inking from a sketch to final shades and examine how the inked lines accentuate the mood of the piece.

Creating a great pencil sketch

Before you start inking, you need to create the pencil sketch, which we learned about...