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Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2005 1:01 pm Post subject: Digital Inking in Illustrator.
I just started trying my hand at digital inking.
I used Illustrator CS and my Wacom Graphire. I did about half the page and took a little over 6 hours all together. Just practicing at the moment.
Any tip or critques you'ld like to give... don't hold back. Not 100% happy with it myself, but this was my first attempt at inking at all in about 15 years. And my first digital attempt ever if you don't count my C=64 days with GEOS.[/img]
Considering I've never used Illustrator for that, I'm not going to even try to offer tips or a critique.
I may have to try my hand at a bit of serious line work in that prog some day, rather than just using it to create modeling shapes and profiles... _________________ "I'd add a legitimate comment here, but that would mean reading everything, which I have no patience for." - Slynky
Unfortunatly this technique is really taking too long to get work from it. I quit after 2 days of almost solid work with barely a quarter of the first page done. If I inked in Photoshop or Painter I should be compleatly done by now.
I decided to break up the image in a simular way to how I would model in Lightwave. I used mostly line segments with no preasure and shaped them to fit the line of the template pencil work.
I did still use the Wacom for some of the more organic details but 90% of this version was moused.
I think the results I got are much better than my Wacom only try. I mean... it's got a really clean draftsman quality to the ink work. But I'm taking way to long to meet a real Comic Inkers deadline. Even though it is a Jim Lee page and most of the pros I talked too said I was insane to attempt it digitially at all.
A side benefit to this process, if I ever speed it up to a viable level, is that I can color flat in Illustrator as well, and possibly do actual coloring using the mesh tool. Combining those 2 1/2 jobs would net me a real nice pay rate. Probably at least $300 a page if I could meet the combined deadlines or Inking and Coloring.
I can out put the finished product at any DPI for some truely staggering results too. But I have a lot of practice to do before I can even decide if this technique CAN be comercially viable in the comic industry.
In the mean time I'll probably finish this as an Illustrator Resume piece. It may not be fast enough for the comic industry, but it does show a hell of alot of Illustrator knowledge no matter how long it takes.
Try this: this is a trcik I *have* done. I do most of my digital "pencil" and "pen" work in Painter 5...
Do the bulk of the inking in painter or photoshop with the tablet, whichever is fastest [painter's fastest for me for some reason]. Then take it into Illustrator and go over the sections where you newd a clean crisp line only with the raster tools, and the places where you need heavy *clean* black shadows for fill.
It doesn't take nearly as long as doing all the linework in Illustrator, and generating clean, sharp lines and shadow is one of Ilustrator's strengths, where as even the best line work in PS or Painter tends to be a bit "fuzzy" when you look at it.
Fuzzy or soft lines are great for some things [like hair and fur], but some places you need a crisp knife edged line... [like guns and equipment] _________________ "I'd add a legitimate comment here, but that would mean reading everything, which I have no patience for." - Slynky
If I had a paying job I was trying to get done right now, you bet I would do just that.
I've even gotten away with inking in PS, selecting the line work, converting the selection to paths then exporting it to sort of fake the clean line.
I'm really trying to develop a style in Illustrator though. It's probably just me being overly fussy, but I never like bitmapped graphics inking. Some people actually prefer it's look to Illustror, but when that line goes soft it just lacks a certain something to me. It's like the a throw back to my pencil work as a kid. I would turn a white piece of paper gray and turn card stock into onion skin with my erasing.
Even the organic lines in the new inking have a certain razor edge quality that just make me feel good. It's a level of unrealistic perfection that I envied in those with the talent to do it.
I have a few dozen pages of other peoples pencils to practice on, and I'm starting with Jim Lee and George Perez because they pencil with an absolutly sick level of detail that makes even the best traditional inker depressed. I have other pages that should be a cake walk compared to this. When I finish them all I'll know what can be done and how fast I can do it.
Welll... that's kind of why I put the scarequotes around "pencil" and "pen" after digital... I'm too used to a set of artists pencils and a set of Rapidographs, I guess. Digital pen and ink work just doesn't "feel" like pen and pencil to me when I do it, and it doesn't have the same "look" to it that I think it should when I'm done.
I kind of envy people who can take a wacom and crank out digital line work and shading that really looks like pencil and shading... I can't do it, so I tend to leave Illustrator mostly for generating sweep and extrusion shapes. ;] And vellum and rapidograh for doing pen & ink sketches.
Color is a different thing entirely: I *really* like Painter for doing color work and adding texture to a drawing or to a render. And photoshop for adding filtering effect. But I can't paint on an image like Morris or LisaB and have it look good - I tend to do a different style.
Well... good luck with it. It'll make an interesting technique if you can perfect it.
Hey - an' you do master it, do up a tutorial on it to post. _________________ "I'd add a legitimate comment here, but that would mean reading everything, which I have no patience for." - Slynky
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And my first digital attempt ever if you don't count my C=64 days with GEOS.[/img]
