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Need help with inking.

This has been something that has been really annoying me recently; I can't seem to get a steady hand when inking in Photoshop, and I don't want to have to resort to using the pen tool. Every time I try to do a long stroke, I always seem to get a bit of shakiness somewhere in the line, and...well, I just need a way to improve, especially when dealing with long strokes.

From what I've heard, inking in Photoshop with a tablet is really really hard to do if you're not using the pen tool. I use the pen tool and have gotten pretty quick with it so don't find it too bad. Though just tablet inking from what I heard is really tough though I'm sure people much better than me can do it. Hehe. A friend of mine does tablet inking in Illustrator though, but in Illustrator they kinda smooth out the lines a little bit for you so helps lessen the shakiness.

Illustrator is great for inking! KoOkY is quite right in saying that it smooths out your lines considerably. Added bonus is that you can still fiddle with the curves etc to get the lines exactly right. :) I have a pretty steady hand, but I have an old clunker of a tablet that skips a beat every now and again, so I cheat a little!

The problem with inking with a tablet is that the hand-eye coordination is different than drawing on paper, where you are drawing on the same surface that the image appears on. I believe it has to do with being able to see where your hand is oriented in relation to the image and the tip of the pen, so making the perfect stroke is a lot easier because you have more orientational information and visual feedback. That's why people love the Cintiqs so much and justifies the cost. I actually got a chance to use one for about an hour at Siggraph, and I can say that it really does make a difference, especially when doing curves. Although it's weird that the cursor may not always be exactly where the tip of your stylus is, but you get used to that pretty quick.

When I have to do line drawings in Photoshop with a tablet, there are two ways that I'll to do a curve. The first is to draw the curve really quick so it's smooth, and then undo it because the curve was off. I'll repeat that about a dozen times until I get it right and move on to the next one.

The other way is I sculpt the curve using very short strokes using a brush that has the size and opacity controlled by the pen pressure. So the more I draw on top of the line the darker it gets, and I can press harder when I'm more confident so the line is thicker and darker. If there's a stray line I'll usually just leave it in and then come in with an eraser and shave away the part of the line I don't like, and then go over it again with my brush to clean it up.

Below is an image that shows both techniques. I made the curve a complex S shape instead of an arc which is what usually builds up my line drawings, but this should prove a point because S's are the hardest type of continuous curves to be accurate with. The blue line took 17 tries to get it close enough. The black line was done using the "sculpting" technique, and took the same amount of time—maybe a little bit longer, actually—but it's much more accurate, and I like the line quality. To me it feels a lot like working in pencil, only going dark with the lines when you know you got it right.

You can try something similar with a brush that is solid so it looks more like ink and has hard edges, and then shave away the imperfections with the eraser, again using quick strokes when possible.

So, what works for me is turning the big complex curves into short fast strokes, and then undo or erase edges of the line when necessary because going fast isn't always accurate. The faster the stroke the smoother it is. If you slow down that's where you get the shakies.

Now, if you don't like the results of inking in Photoshop, and you have no problems using a real ink brush or technical pens, then do that instead and scan it in. You don't have to use Photoshop for everything; use it for what it's best at, and experiment with it when you have time and want to learn something new. When I first started working digitally I found Photoshop to be great at putting down color, but not for doing line drawings. Now however, I try to do the whole process in Photoshop so I can get more used to using a tablet. Yeah, it took more time at first, but now I'm pretty confident with it.

And it is easier to be slow with a real ink brush because the bristles create a kind of suspension system between the paper and the handle. You don't have that with a tablet so ANY movement goes right into your art program. That's something to think about.

Also, some more tips: The smaller the lines the easier they are to do with a tablet; don't zoom in too close. The thicker the lines the easier it is for them to look accurate and smooth. And how many times have you rotated your sketch pad so you can get curves right? You can't do that with a tablet without messing yourself up (although you can with a Cintiq), but there are some art programs like ArtRage and Pencil (an animation program that I use) that allows you to quickly rotate the canvas like an animator's table so you can draw curves better. And try not to erase too much; force yourself to be more confident with the marks you put down.

Yeah, the only time I've used Photoshop to do "inking" is either for concept art, where it was okay to look loose, or an organic looking pen and ink style. The only comic book style inking I've done was in Illustrator and for those reasons mentioned previously. It has a really nice tool called the Pencil Tool, the one Sudan Red was talking about, which allows you to redraw parts of a curve or create new ones. The Brush Tool actually has this same ability as well, but it only works on curves that were drawn using the Brush Tool.

The Art Brushes in Illustrator are actually really nice, and they respond to pressure sensitivity as well. The problem is that you can't change which parts are thick and thin after you've drawn the curve. So that's kind of a bummer.

Instead of using Art Brushes for inking you can try just making solid shapes, which you can then edit the thickness of by using the Pencil Tool. This is how this image below was done.

Also, if you like using the Art Brushes but you still want to edit the thickness as well, you can convert them to paths by going to Object > Expand Appearance from the menu.

Edit: Okay, so the forums don't like SVG files (it worked in the preview). So here's the PNG instead.

Thanks for all the detailed replies. Sorry I couldn't get back to you sooner. I had school matters to deal with. I've been experimenting some more with the fast strokes, and they're not as shaky as they used to be after a bunch of tries, but I still need to improve on my aiming accuracy. I might give the Cintique a try, but for now, I have do things with the Graphire 4 or Intuos 3. This all brings me to my next point: line weights. The inking style I want to try to master is a not very thick one. I'm currently using brush sizes of around 5 pixels at 8.5x11in, 300dpi, for inking out characters spread onto the canvas. Not sure if that's too small, what do you think? Super thick line styles aren't really my thing since I tend to focus a lot on light and shades. Something like this is what I'd aim for: http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/7276/jerbipose02xb7.jpg But anyway, here's a very rough sketch of an oldish drawing. The lighting's coming along, but I think the line thickness completely sucks hard. I don't know when and where to make things thicker or thinner, and the issues I mentioned in my first post wasn't helping. Soo...critique on line weights is what I need. If you could point out the rules of line weights, it would help, and of course, I would like it if you could point out the linework that's wrong on the image I posted.

I tried the 5 pixel brush on a letter size canvas and it seemed like it was plenty thick enough. On your drawing it looks like the line width is smaller though.

On the left side of the head the line work actually looks pretty good. It looks like you did each line in one smooth stroke. The shirt and arm don't though, and I'm assuming that it's because the lines are longer so you had to use the small short lines trick. It look like the lines that you were less confident about are the ones that are thinner, so don't be afraid to use full pressure even though you might mess up.

I'd say just keep on practicing and experimenting to find out what works best. The trick is to make your lines look like they were done using one stroke even though they may or may not be. So I usually switch between big long strokes and small ones depending on what line I have to draw. And I use the eraser frequently to clean up my lines, so it's okay to overshoot a curve or make the line too thick from drawing over it too much (one thing I'll do is keep on drawing the line until one side is where I want it, and then carefully remove the thickness of the line on the other side using quick strokes with my eraser). So, you can just erase the part that you don't want at any time. And practice doing as many long strokes as you can, because when you get good at it it'll save you lots of time. And if long strokes are hard but short ones are not, because you have to move your whole hand to do them, just zoom out so drawing the curve is easier.

And again, thin lines are harder to be accurate and clean with than thick lines. Thin lines leave you very little room for error, especially when you are drawing over them.

As for rules of line drawings: objects that are closer or overlapping are going to have thicker lines, objects that you want to give more contrast will have thicker lines, and if a line needs to be darker to represent shadow then it should be be thicker too. Use thin lines for small details and object that you don't want to draw too much attention too. It's also okay for some lines to not be drawn at all. These are called suggested lines because your mind fills in the blank. Also, flowing from thick to thin mid-line is cool looking too (the image you linked to does that around the leg).

So that's basically what I think about when doing line art. Here's a good summary that someone else put together about line art: http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm#line_art

But yeah, it takes some practice. I took me about a year to really get comfortable inking with a tablet. Since you want to do inking instead of just pencil-like line drawings, which is why I use the quick small strokes a lot, just keep on practicing with big long strokes when you can and then use the short ones when it's not working out because they do take longer to draw and are harder to clean up compared to the pencil-like lines.

If you are interested I could probably do a video showing my process. I'm experimenting with 720p HD screencasts so I can put them on Vimeo at full resolution. So it might be a fun trial run.

Sudan Red said: Illustrator is great for inking! KoOkY is quite right in saying that it smooths out your lines considerably. Added bonus is that you can still fiddle with the curves etc to get the lines exactly right. :) I have a pretty steady hand, but I have an old clunker of a tablet that skips a beat every now and again, so I cheat a little!

I need to give that a shot again. Takes me about 40-45 minutes to ink just a single character using the pen tool in Photoshop and don't even get variable line widths with that unless you go back and futz around with it and taper the ends with the eraser or something. Hehe. Haven't used Illustrator in years though but has got to be faster than what I'm doing.

One thing that I've tried that works really well is doing the inking using the brush tool in Illustrator, then copy and paste it into Photoshop as a Smart Object, create a clipping mask, and then I can color the lines using all the fun Photoshop tools that I'm familiar with. Filling in is really easy too, just use the magic wand tool, set it to Sample All Layers, create a new action with a function key so you can quickly expand the selection by a pixel or two to get rid of the halo, and then fill it in. Once you filled the character in you can then lock the transparency on the fill layer so you don't have to be careful about not painting outside of the character, letting you do whatever kind of crazy shading you want.

The really sweet thing about this is that you can scale all three of those layers together and not loose any resolution in your line drawing, because it's still vector even in Photoshop.

Fr0styRyan, I'd actually suggest giving Illustrator inking a try, assuming that you have a copy. You might really like it for inking.

And I really should do a video tutorial on this stuff. :)

Wow! That seems a bit complex though too, can't you just save it out as a .PSD file and open it up in Photoshop? Can just keep the inks on a different layer to do whatever you're going to be doing with them. Though it's been years since I tried bringing anything from Illustrator over to PS so maybe isn't as easy as I think. But sure I'm always up for checking out new tutorials if you wanna make one. :)

Yeah, I'll make a video showing how that works tomorrow—or the day after if I turn into a perfectionist. I would like to show an actual drawing to demo with, which I think would help Fr0styRyan a lot.

I did get a chance to do some screencasting tests at 1280x720 today and I'm quite pleased with the results. I haven't recorded videos at that resolution before, so it's good to know my computer can handle it. However, I just barely moved so I haven't unpacked all my audio equipment yet, so I'll have to settle with talking into a headset.

Okay, I recorded and edited the video yesterday and I've already uploaded it to Vimeo. Unfortunetly it's taking them a long time to encode it. The fact that it's 34 minutes long probably has something to do with it. The video is part software tutorial and part demonstration because I wanted Fr0styRyan to see most of what I was doing, and I didn't rehearse it either so aside from some editing and time lapse it's as short as I can get it. Anyway, there should be some good info in there so I hope it helps with inking and coloring.

EDIT: New URL: http://www.vimeo.com/metsystutorials

Make sure that the icon in the video player is set to "HD is ON." You can then watch it right in the web browser at full resolution; just click on the full screen button and enjoy.

And don't worry, these videos don't take much time to put together. I've been doing these for a while now, so feel free to ask for a demo at any time.

*pouts 'n waits seeing it's only 11% done* :) Can't wait to check it out. Do you have a gallery of your work somewhere also? Been curious to see some of what you've done.

Yeah, the video is stuck on 11%. Hopefully it'll get fixed by tomorrow morning.

Just in case something went really wrong, I uploaded the file again under a slightly different title hoping that at least one of them will finish. It's almost midnight now and well past peak hours, so I shouldn't have to wait through the queue for the video to start converting.

EDIT: And neither of the videos worked. I'm going to upload the video in a different format.

I've been thinking about showing some of my other stuff. I'm kind of an outsider and don't have any anthro art that I can show that isn't studio related. And even though I'm not hiding anything I'm still debating on how much I like being anonymous :). I was thinking about participating in the trading post when I have time and showing some original stuff here and there. But yeah, I have been thinking about it.

If nothing else there's the squirrels image from earlier in the thread, and the following image is from the tutorial after an hours worth of work without having to give a demonstration while working. It's tricky illustrating and teaching at the same time, and after I finished the video I wanted to at least put another hour into the drawing—which I probably should have done a time lapse of. Ack.

Well, all I really did was fix a few lines (and the cross eyes), separate the hair, skin and shirt fills into different layers so it would be easier to color, and did the usual painting techniques for the background. So you didn't really miss anything unless I don't do a video on painting. :)

Oh, and here's how far I got the video tutorial before I went ahead and finished the image today.

So there's a little teaser for ya until that video finishes converting.

Yay! It works now!

Both videos are listed here: http://www.vimeo.com/metsystutorials

Direct link to Part 1: http://www.vimeo.com/982474
Direct link to Part 2: http://www.vimeo.com/982847

The new files worked great, and splitting them up into 15 minute chunks helped too. Next time people won't have to wait so long now that I know what works. Although for a video this length it still takes about 4 hours from final edit to it being available on Vimeo. Yeah, I was really used to using Vimeo for short videos.

Anyway, I'm extremely happy with the results. The video quality for the HD stream is really good. I'm going to do all of my other video tutorials this way from now on: no mirrors, no torrents, HD, streamable, downloadable, and I don't have to host them. I already liked Vimeo before, but—wow, this service rocks.

And I got the new Iris album today, so I'm in a pretty good mood. :)

Wow nice tutorial. You should post it in the "tutorials" forum also so that even more people can see it. I knew a lot of the hot keys and techniques you use, but some of them I didn't know (like how to use the lock transparency feature). Makes me wish I had Illustrator now...a little (this is a big step for me as I've hated it for a long time - so frustrating to learn).

Thanks Vizon.

I remember hating Illustrator too, for illustrating with anyway. It's great for graphic design where things are so accurately and deliberately placed, but when it comes to creating images quickly it's not really suited for it, depending on the style of course. That's why I rarely use Illustrator for my illustration work unless I need to add typography or logos or something like that. I don't do the cartoony style often, but when I do I most certainly use Illustrator for that.

It really boils down to the style you like, how much time it takes you to do it, and how much you get paid for it. Luckily that inking thing I showed is super quick and easy to do, and there's even quicker things you can do with Illustrator if you like solid color fills and two tone shading (like Live Paint and the knife tool).

I have seen people do some amazing work with Illustrator, like this lunatic for example: http://www.crisvector.com/ Now there's someone I wish would give a demo. I can't imagine how much time goes into those, but it's amazing stuff nonetheless.

Thanks Metsys! I'd been wanting to learn how to ink in Illustrator and will check out the tutorials once I get some time to spare. Busy week ahead. :P Has to be faster than PS pen tool right? Or at least will be more dynamic with the line widths. Hehe. And yeah that's some intense illustrator work under that Cris Vector link, whew! Looks like Illustrator would be great for cell shading though.

Illustrator is REALLY good with cell shading.

If you use calligraphic brushes to do line drawings and want to quickly fill it in using Illustrator, select all your lines, click on Object > Expand Appearance (you need to this otherwise you'll loose your thick and thin lines when you convert it to a Live Paint Group). Then press K to select the Live Paint Bucket, make sure all your line art is still selected then click on it to covert it to a Live Paint Group, and now you can start filling in areas with the currently selected color (default is transparent so pick a new color).

Also, since your line art isn't just strokes anymore, you can use the Live Paint tool to change the color of your line art too. The now solid lines will still have the original stroke line in the middle, so you'll have to color both sides of the line unless you fix that. To fix it (if you want to) select the middle line by using the direct select tool (shortcut A), and then press delete twice (once for the arc and the second time for the entire line).

Holding down the left mouse button when you paint lets you fill multiple areas at once.

Once you are done with that you can expand the Live Paint and start using the knife tool to separate the filled areas for two-tone shading—or three, or four, however many tones you want. There could be a more elegant way of doing this because I've found rendering bugs when you have two shapes that butt up against each other which is what happens when you use the knife tool; overlapping shapes don't do that.

You can start using gradients too if you want. If you are really adventurous you can use gradient meshes, which are really cool.