Inking with Corel Painter

This time last year I was inking 95% of my stuff the traditional way and then scanning it in to colour and letter it. Never thought I’d get into digital inking so quick if ever and now it’s the other way around, 95% digital. The last pic that I actually inked was this thing.

I still feel sort of ashamed to be doing it all digitally but loads of artists I admire and respect are at it so why not?

Been getting a few questions about how I do it so here is a quick walk through of a page. All this is done in Corel Painter 9.5 with a Wacom tablet. I think it’s a Graphire 3.

This is page 10 from the Freak Show comic. The script was very loose and basically said the two characters walk through the deserted fairground, one of them sees the monster, the man gives chase and gives up. No direct instructions about how it should be broken down which is a godsend, so I got to pace it and plan the layout myself.

So I roughed out the whole 20 pages half arsed and this is page 10:

Top notch art! This was just to see if it reads right. The establishing of scene, a mood shot, character sees something, reacts, character runs, runs, struggles and gives up. I can’t see how it could be done in less panels.

For this page I done loose pencils over a printout of the rough. I didn’t need to do pencils for around 12 of the pages and just drew over the roughs. That’s why most of it looks shit. Ah’m only joshing ya!

I added in a few bits in the pencils like the overturned popcorn stand and tighter backgrounds.

Once the pencils are scanned in you can inkify. I use the scratchboard tool which can be found in the Pens. Always warm up with some doodles to make sure your settings are okay, these are typical of what that involves.

All those strokes are from the same brush without adjusting the pressure sensitivity or other settings. If you want to change them go to Preferences—Brush Tracking and do 5 average strokes and Painter figures out what settings suit your limp wrist best. Keep in mind that the relative scale will change if your doodle pad isn’t near the same size as the pencilled page.

Blammo! Inked in around an hour. I don’t feel so ashamed when I have 5 extra hours to pull my pud.

One of the many features that mimics real life inking in Painter is the way you can rotate the page so easy for those tricky angles. Having the safety net of an undo button allows you to experiment a lot more. I cheat with my speedlines and use pre-made ones. The last panel where he’s knackered, it’s tempting to put in an easy background there because it’s a flat horizontal angle but I went for no background because it suited it better and makes him look alone and lost

Colouring is fun in Painter too, I used to really hate it but sort of look forward to it now. Blazmack! Finished:

For the colours I dropped in that blue on the whole bottom layer and then with the chalk tool layed in the next layer of flats. Slap some highlights in and then blend them with a custom blendy tool and that’s it finished. Here’s the final colour layer without the black for all you perverts:

That’s as simple as it is. Fairly handy and fast to do. So give it a go and if you have any questions and need somebody to ask, try your local priest. Or me.

Yeah that wasn’t really a tutorial in fairness, just me showing off.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 12:38 am and is filed under General Comic Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.