How to Use Digital Inking for Anime
- 1). Prepare the sketch for inking. Place your sketch on its own layer. You may wish to lighten the sketch by adjusting the layer opacity or tint the sketch using your program's colorize function. These techniques help you tell which areas you've already inked.
- 2). Create a new layer over the sketch. Some programs have special "pen" layers. These use vectors instead of raster pixels to produce the line. This kind of inked image is cleaner-looking and easier to resize. It's not available in all programs, however.
- 3). Select a hard-edged pen tool. In Photoshop, use a hard round brush. In Painter, try the "Scratchboard" tool or one of the pen options. Other programs may have different tools available. Experiment with strokes on a separate document until you find one that feels right to you.
- 4). Ink your drawing. Trace the drawing on your new layer, using the hard edged pen tool set to 100% opacity. Use long strokes instead of short ones to avoid a choppy look, and vary line thickness to create the illusion of depth. Clean up stray lines with a flat, hard eraser tool. Pay close attention to the eyes and face, since these are important areas in anime style art.
- 5). Delete the sketch layer. You should now have a clean, inked layer ready to be colored or for printing.
