Inking for Comics, Cartooning, and Manga in Corel Painter
By Jared Hodges

Think of the line work in any comic book, newspaper cartoon, or manga you've ever read. Odds are, you're not thinking the penciled understructure, but a definitive contour line inked in black.

In this article, I will share how I use the tools in Corel Painter to ink comics, cartoons, and manga art.

Most comics, cartoons, and manga use the same or similar techniques for inking. For the sake of brevity, I'll pile all these terms under comics. Keep in mind that while I'm discussing inking for comics, I could just as well be talking about inking artwork of any style.

Purpose for Inking

There are several objectives the inker hopes to accomplish when redrafting a piece of work, including clarifying and weighting lines, adding texture and shading, and most importantly, correcting and finalizing the art for black and white printing. In essence, the purpose of inking is to "finish" the sketch.

Preparing the Sketch for Inking

Inking requires source material. It starts with and grows atop a pre-existing sketch. It doesn't matter what medium. Some people sketch with pencil, some with charcoal, some with ballpoint pen. Some work on paper, others sketch directly in Painter. There are lots of ways to approach the sketch, so long as it eventually makes its way into Painter for digital inking.

Once in Painter, it's helpful to colorize and lighten the sketch so that it doesn't compete with the black inks. Most of my sketches consist of dark pencil lines. If I tried to ink over these lines unmodified, I'd probably go blind attempting to discern pencils from inks.

Here's what I do:

Float the sketch on a layer. Open the Color Talk function in Painter (accessed by pressing "n"). Set the formula in the command line to Red=1. Running this command will change the sketch to bright red. The key is to create contrast. Blue, green or any other color can be substituted here if you can't stand looking at red.

I also suggest decreasing the intensity of the colorized sketch. The simplest way to do this is to drop the layer opacity. The amount depends on how dark the line work was originally. I usually drop the layer opacity to around 40%.

Inking the Sketch

Inking demands careful reinterpretation of the original sketch. Like tracing, inks are done on layers overtop of the original sketch work. Sometimes I separate portions of my inks on different layers, especially if I'm trying something experimental and I don't want it to affect other finished areas. Use as many or as few layers as you wish when inking.

Tip 1

Because inking involves only two values, black and white, it makes sense to set the front and rear Color Selection Boxes in Painter to these absolute values. In the natural media world, an inker often goes back and forth between black India ink for lines, and white liquid opaque for corrections and effects. I like to think of these boxes as little bottomless inkwells for my digital quill.

Tip 2

When inking in Painter, I set the forward switch on my Wacom stylus to macro SHIFT+X, the Painter front/rear color changing command. This way I can easily toggle from black to white. Alternating between these two values is a good technique for clean up, and reduces the need to switch to the eraser tool or flip the stylus to erase aberrant lines. In the world of inking, a dab of white over a black mistake is the same as erasing.

The Inker's Art Bin

Inking is a process traditionally done with pens, brushes, ink and quills. Painter's natural media tools are a wonder at recreating the look of traditional ones, while packing all the convenience the digital domain has to offer.

Preloaded in Painter are a number of brush tools, listed under the Pens category that are excellent for digital inking. Seven years ago, I learned the art of ditital inking with these default tools. Today, I continue to use these brushes in my professional work.

Of the close to 30 Pens preloaded in Painter, there are two primary ones I use for 90% of my line work. These two workhorses of my inking library are the Scratchboard Tool, and a modified Ball Point Pen.

Scratchboard Tool

This is the pen I utilize most often. Its design is perfect for creating smooth, flowing contour lines. I use it for general-purpose line work, including character art, backgrounds, objects, line effects, and hatching. With the minimum brush stroke size set to 0%, the drawn line trails off gracefully, rather than ending in a thick stump. For most tasks, I keep the pen size small, around 2.5-4.5 pixels, as even at these sizes the line can thicken quickly under full pressure.

Ball Point Pen - Custom Variant

Start with the Ball Point Pen 1.5 tool

Open the Brush Controls palettes (Window menu > Brush Controls > Show General

In the General palette, change the Method to "Cover" and the Subcategory to "Grainy Hard Buildup"

Next, change the Opacity to 100%

In the Size palette, change the brush profile to the Pointed Profile, change the Size to 5 pixels , change the Min size to 70%and the Expression to Pressure. Finally, change the Step Size to 1%

I call this variant the Brush Pen. This pen stands out from the Scratchboard Tool in a couple of useful ways. First, the Brush Pen foregoes precision, opting instead for a bold line. Second, the pen is dramatically influenced by the paper texture. At sizes smaller than 10 pixels, the texture is hardly noticeable, mostly expressed at the edge of the line. Set at sizes larger than 10 pixels, the grain becomes very apparent. The paper grain can add a sense of natural ruggedness to the inks. It's also useful for tackling subjects like patches of vegetation and textured surfaces.

With a large size setting and a heavy stroke, the brush works well for filling in areas of black. Using a light stroke, the brush works like a rubbing, capturing only the paper texture.

Because of this pen's textured nature, it can introduce unwanted grey values into a picture. When finished inking, consider flattening the inks onto a white layer and running a two level Posterize pass to remove the grey values.

Other Pens

My "Boring Pen"

The Leaky Pen - Used in the headdress

My "Horror Pen"

At last count, my Pen library contains 36 pens for inking. Some are minor variants of out-of-the-box tools; others are variants of variants. Most are only useful for certain specific effects. I've called one such variant my "Boring Pen." It's based off the Flat Color pen, but the default line size is set to 5 pixels. Its uniform line is good for hand lettering, sound effects, and comical characters. Another unique brush creates a jagged broken line, good for horror scenes. Another still makes raked grooves like a tire track. Others are useful for quickie stippling effects. And so on. When you discover a pen that proves useful for a task, tag it and save the variant in your library. You never know when it may come in handy.

Speedlines

Speedlines are line effects comprised of precision drawn tapered parallel lines perfect for implying motion, emphasis, or impact in a drawing. Traditionally, speedlines are made by placing a ruler on paper and crutching a quill pen against it. The pen skates along the ruler edge as the inker varies the line with pressure when necessary. Using these tools, it's easy to create batches of speedlines. Painter IX has several tricks to aid us in creating these all-important lines without rulers.

Note
Creating speedlines can be a sloppy process. Oftentimes these lines will overlap and cut through other finished line work. For this reason, I suggest inking these lines on a separate layer. Once the extraneous lines are erased, they can be dropped into a layer with all the other finished inks.

The Align-to-Path feature in Corel Painter IX.5 can help create lines where both precision and line width variation is necessary. Start by creating a path with a light-colored line and thin stroke setting. Travel over this path with the scratchboard tool set on Align-to-Path. Be careful to follow the line and taper at the appropriate ends. Once the line is finished, relocate the path, and draw the next line. For creating large batches of lines a quicker method is noted below.

Align-to-Path + Record Stroke.

To do a batch of parallel strokes, use Painter's Record Stroke feature on the initial stroke and the Stroke Playback feature to recreate the stroke over and over again by simply tapping the stylus around where the midsection of the new line is supposed to be.

Hopefully this primer sheds some light on the process of digital inking and provides you with some ideas to get started. Like all art disciplines, inking takes practice, so keep working at it, and have fun!

Artist Bio:
Jared Hodges is a freelance artist based in Florida who has worked on illustrations, character designs, comics, and more.

His primary job for the last several years has been not only dutifully tracing lines, but adding a special touch of magic to the inks on the first, second, and upcoming third volume of Peach Fuzz, a comedic manga series about a young girl and a pet ferret who thinks she's a princess.

He is also the co-author of Digital Manga Workshop, a how-to handbook on digital art covering Photoshop and Painter, as well as a participant in the upcoming how-to book, Mangaka America, both published by Collins Design.

You can see more of his work at www.jaredandlindsay.com.