This is part 3 of a peek into my process for creating a page from my online graphic novel, Nathan Sorry. Warning: I am not an accomplished comic book artist so my way of doing things may not be something you should model your own process from. Especially in the case of inking which is what this part is all about.

3. Inking

Nathan Sorry is a learning process for me in respect to a lot of things (writing, the art of telling a story in comics form) but what it’s really been teaching me is something I’ve wanted to focus on and learn for a long time: how to ink my work in a  way that I don’t personally find nauseating.

If you read through the story from page 1 you’ll see how far I’ve come in only 25 pages. The first 10 or so pages are so rough that I’ll probably have to redo most of it when it’s all done to correct some ugly mistakes and to try to make it look cohesive with the later pages. I guess I actually hope I’ll eventually feel the same way about this page when I’m on page 50. Not only have I learned how to clean up the quality of my lines considerably but I’ve been experimenting with different tools and am starting to settle on ones that work for me. Yes, this makes the book look very haphazard so far but the learning is what’s important and I can always go back and correct things later on.

Anyway, I tend to use a combination of a #1 size brush, a #6 for filling in large areas, a Speedball 512 quill pen and a small Hunt nib (don’t know the size) for lightweight lines, plus a couple of Copic brush and finepoint pens for doing straight lines and some touch up. I’m really at the point though where I’m mostly using just the #1 brush for almost everything. I used to use the nibs much more but I find now that the brush is the most flexible tool and once you get used to it you can use it to pull off almost any type of line you need.

I ink directly on top of my pencils, erasing them when I’m done, as I mentioned in the previous post. I basically tighten up my rough pencils by inking and that usually works out okay but it sometimes can lead to some horrible mistakes. I’ll occasionally break out the white paint to fix things but I generally wind up doing that in Photoshop since it needs to get cleaned up there anyway. In some ways, it’s harder and takes more work to correct in Photoshop and the drawback is that your original inks are not really finished but I do what I have to do to keep making progress.

Here are the uncleaned-up inks for this page. A few things here I’m not too happy with and I’ll fix them up a little in Photoshop but overall I think this works okay. Scanning in the inks and looking at it on screen gives you a different viewpoint of the page and uneven or rough looking lines sometimes look more offensive then they do on paper so I usually try to clean a lot of things up at this point.

I originally planned this as a 3 part posting, but really the Photoshop works is extensive enough that I guess I’ll save that for a part 4.