Comic Books: Digital Inking and Refinement

Want to create your own comic books? Inking is a crucial part of the process. It's one of the final steps, where lines are traced more intentionally and artists focus on dynamic lighting and shadows. These days, pencil drawings aren't always necessarily "inked" but sometimes digitally scanned and refined, resulting in the finished inked look typical of most comics. In this course, comic creator Ben Bishop shows two methods for finishing comics in Photoshop, using examples from his graphic novel, The Aggregate. Method 1 is the traditional approach. After carefully selecting his brushes in Photoshop, Ben begins the digital inking process. He carefully retraces his lines, adding line weight, halos, highlights, and shadows and texture. He even adds blur effects that give his comics a cinematic quality while also using positive and negative space to set the mood of the scene and create a compositionally pleasing page.

Learning objectives
What is digital inking?
Creating a page template
Sizing artwork
Choosing the right Photoshop brush
Inking linework
Filling in black areas
Inking by converting drawings to grayscale