Following up after the last blog post, I’ll show you the next steps in how my process of inking comics goes. As you remember, I was showing you pages from Sunnyville Stories episode 6 being inked. The lettering has been done, the panel borders and speech balloons have been inked, and the pencil lines have all been erased.
So what comes next? Once I have the clean lineart, I start a process called “spotting blacks”. That involves using the brush.
There is one thing that the brush does the best and that’s for spotting blacks. That term means filling in the black areas. What I do is that I will put in shadows, eyes, characters, clothing, and anything else on the comics page that needs to be black.
Here is an example of the page after I have finished spotting blacks.
Notice the sheen of the still wet ink. Like after inking the lines, you have to let the ink dry before continuing on. As before, I keep a bottle of ink and a jar of water by my drawing board for doing the black areas. If you need a refresher on how to ink with a brush, refer back to the first and second posts I did on that subject.
Once the black area is dry, I move onto doing patterns. I will do hatching (lines going across, up, or down), cross-hatching (two or three sets of lines across, up or down), scribbling, and stippling (dots). My tools may vary. I may use the nib pens for those. Other times, I’ll use a Uniball pen or a Rapidograph as shown in this photo.
Here, I’m doing some hatching on Gasparo Escavatore’s shirt. My tool of choice here is the 0.50mm Rapidograph.
Once I’ve finished doing the various patterns…I’m done with the page usually.
Here we see the finished inked comics page.
Before putting it away, I’ll give it a last check. If any mistakes are made, I’ll cover it up with white paint and then do a correction over the paint. If any areas don’t look dark enough, it will get a touching up.
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