Inking

Inking is not tracing

The oldest misunderstanding about the job is that the inker follows the pencils. They do not. Pencils describe what is in the panel; ink decides what the reader sees first. A single pencil drawing inked by two people produces two different comics, and the difference is not neatness.

Four decisions belong to the inker, and none of them are in the pencils:

1. Which edges get a line at all. A shadow edge, a fold, a change of material — each can be a line, a tone, or nothing. Lining everything produces a page that is uniformly busy and therefore has no focus.
2. Line weight. Heavier on the outside contour, on the shadow side, and on whatever is nearest the reader.
3. Spotting blacks. Where the solid black areas sit, and whether they balance across the page. This is the single biggest lever on mood, and the one most often skipped.
4. Texture. Hatching, crosshatching, feathering, dry brush — how a surface reads as brick, silk or skin without colour.

Spotting blacks, concretely

Squint at a finished page until detail disappears. You should see a clear arrangement of black shapes leading the eye through the panels. If the squint-view is an even grey, the page has no structure, and adding screentone on top will only bury it further.

Practical habits: give every panel at least one genuine black anchor; keep the blacks distributed rather than clustered in one corner; and put black behind the focal figure rather than on it, so the figure reads light against dark.

Tools, and what each one is actually for

• Nib pens (G-pen, maru pen) — pressure-sensitive, huge weight range in a single stroke. The manga default; the G-pen for figures, the fine maru pen for detail and backgrounds.
• Brush — the widest range and the most organic taper. Best for drapery, hair, and anything that should feel like it moves.
• Technical pens — dead uniform width. Correct for machinery, architecture, panel borders; deadening on a face.
• Digital — the same brushes simulated, plus the one real advantage: stabilisation, and the ability to ink on a separate layer so the pencils stay intact.

The digital-specific mistakes

Ink on its own layer at 600–1200 dpi bitmap or greyscale, not at screen resolution — lines scaled up later go fuzzy, and fuzzy lines fight halftone screens in print.

Close your shapes. Any contour that will later be coloured needs no gaps, because flatting depends on fill selections not leaking. Chasing a one-pixel hole across a page of hair is a genuinely miserable way to spend an afternoon, and it is entirely preventable at the inking stage.