Saturday Comics Class: Inking "Bible"

Thanks for coming today, you guys! Great to see attendance climbing. Here's the final edit on the handout from today's session. I would like to recommend that you print it out.

Inking notes

Mixing it up

Varying these factors adds huge amounts of graphic snap and assurance to your inking, even if you are using them kind of willy-nilly:

Line Weights
Curves and straights (in outlines)
Inking techniques
Soft Edges and Hard (I forgot this earlier drafts!)
Line quality — see below

Making it easier

Warm up!!—see examples of techniques below. Make some up! :)
Note that, if you blur your eyes, some of these techniques pictured below yield a transition from dark to light. Others make a more even gray.
Practice light touch for fine lines
Light, swift touch for “verve.” Dead-line tools like Microns can feather—with the right touch and the right speed of attack in the stroke
Pulling and throwing feathered strokes —Experiment!
Put many tools within reach—experiment with several as you warm up AND as you work
(Looking for the perfect tool? Try not to. Throw a wide net. Otherwise, the tool that seems to suit you now may end up stalling your growth, cramping your style. The best inkers are generalists, more or less comfortable with a grab-bag of techniques.)

Shading should often be a transition for dark to light. IMPORTANT to put the heavier ends of line on the darker side, with the pointed ends pointing toward lighter areas.
Using line weight to differentiate foreground and background. For example see the crowd of prisoners surrounding the others in the last panel of the Vampirella page.

The light, even line weight makes them look father away. Here’s a stellar example by the late Jack Davis. He used three different inking styles to divide this scene unmistakably into front, middle and back planes! ……..

You can vary line quality in accord with:

Material
Distance
Emotion

(Giving all lines similar weight / quality / feel can be dull, and less descriptive. Silk, velvet, wood, stone, stainless steel, hair, e.g., should all be inked with different qualities of stroke, ideally, in many styles, not all.)

A rule of Thumb: In inking, rule freehand-penciled straights and vice versa—-Freehand-ink ruled pencil straights. (To follow this, you’ll need to do some practicing of free handing straight lines. The idea is to avoid a cold, mechanical feeling in the lines..)
Try changing both line weight and direction at the same point, as the pros often do. It makes the art look graphic and snappy, not pudgy or sludgy.
Fear not the break. It adds a little bit of crispness to leave a tiny space between one bit of outline and another.
Touch (and intention) more important than tools: "tTouch over tools” This means: practiced skill with a range of tools makes particular tool selection less important.
“Semi-contained” shading/feathering can look cool
Trap shading: a trap for newbies
“But I am thinking about every line before I make it,” said my inker friend … Form an intention before each stroke. In time, this will take only a fraction of a second. Still important
If you can make make a row of identical feathered strokes, good on you. It can be more descriptive and a tad easier to make a series of strokes go through some some of progression, e.g. getting longer, finer and/or more widely spaced. That makes a lovely transition fro dark to light.
Simplicity is your partner in storytelling, distraction your enemy…
As the great Wallace Wood said, “When in doubt, black it out.”
Be precise on eyes