So this is the ‘Work In Progress’ getting a little more looking finished. This is stage 2 - inking.
I have a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet that I bought in the Apple Store in Glasgow one shopping trip. I hadn’t even counted on buying something like that as I had a… well… mostly working graphics tablet (OK, it was a £20 piece of crap from Trust, but still) but as an impulse purchase, it’s definitely been my favorite. I do any digital artwork in Photoshop. I originally found Photoshop such a cumbersome program (cumbersome, dunno why but it seems to be my word of the moment…) to do any drawing in, but the Bamboo makes it so much easier. That’s the great thing about the Wacom tablet - pressure sensitivity, no need for batteries in the pen, flip it over and you don’t even need to activate the eraser tool. It’s awesome.
I tend to do all inking on a clear layer with the scanned-in picture as the background layer. In this instance (mostly to help me in the next step) I have also made a layer mask with the lineart so I have just the pencil lines - no white space at all. It’s so bloody useful to see the pencil lineart by itself, especially when you’re like me and you do little visual cues for where there’s going to be shading and the like.
On this piece, I’m using a normal brush with a 5px diameter, and 3px for finer details. I don’t tend to use custom brushes unless I really need to, as I feel it gives my stuff the look I’m wanting. I’m not going for photo-realistic after all. And anyways, with the pressure sensitivity I can vary the line weight as if I’m inking in real life anyways.
Up next, we’ll give this sucka some colour!
