Essential Strategies to Inking Your Pencil Drawings

Mar 25

Tutorials


Inking your Pencil Drawings by William Beachy from Go Media on Vimeo.

In this video I will show you some of the ways that I ink my pencil drawings. This is my first video tutorial, so I would appreciate any advice or tips.

Go Media is a creative agency based in Cleveland, Ohio. Besides the GoMediaZine, we also work for clients and sell stock artwork and design files on the Arsenal.

sketch, tutorial, Video

This post was written by:

William Beachy - who has written 42 posts on GoMediaZine.

I was born in the Louisiana bayou and slept on a mud floor until I was 16. Ok, that's not really true. I grew up in Cleveland Hts. Ohio and had a nice cushy bed. I was drawing constantly as a child, took art classes and eventually became the "class artist." I graduated from The Ohio State University's department of Industrial Design. I have always been trying to blend my passion for illustration with solid Graphic Design. Go Media was the culmination of my passion for both business and art. I'm trying to build a company that is equally awesome for the designers AND our clients.

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  • lupzdut
    Thank you so much for this! It has a lot of useful information. I hope we get to see more non-digital tutorials like this one. Thanks again.
  • Kenny
    What kind of brush are you using again?
  • Fardunwaith
    Bill,

    Thanks very much, I am working my way into this area of drawing (mostly technical) and really appreciate the detail in this tutorial. As several people said, seeing you tackle more technical drawings would be great. Thanks a ton to you and everyone else at Go Media!
  • Bill-

    Thanks for the tutorial. I appreciate your well-articulated instruction.

    I've been attempting more brush and digital inking recently and having the opportunity to watch your process has definitely helped clarify some technical questions that have been bugging me.

    I echo Mary's interest in seeing how you tackle mechanical/manmade objects.

    I look forward to seeing more in the future and will definitely pass on this tutorial.

    Great work.
  • Mary
    Hi Bill, I was wondering if you use the brush as well to ink straight lines. For example, buildings and stuff like that.

    Thanks ! Keep up the excellent work.
  • As far as scanning and coloring - normally you DO NOT Vectorize a comic book style drawing. There is just WAY too much detail in there. Normally you will just scan it at high resolution then take it into Photoshop or Corel Paint to color it.
  • Typically the inking is done on the SAME paper as the pencil drawing. Once the inking is done and left for a day to dry - the piece is gone back over with an eraser to clean up any left over pencil lines. SO, normally the pencil drawing is lost.

    It IS possible to use a light box and redraw the entire piece on a different sheet of paper. But this would take a lot of work. If I'm really concerned about preserving my pencil drawing, I'll just scan it into my computer at super high resolution... so people can see what the "before" drawing looked like.
  • Mordos
    Very very nicey done, thanks for the tips !!
  • Farishta
    that was very interesting ! this video tutorial is great :D
    I was wondering if you re-draw on the paper before inking, or there is a technique to transfer a drawing ?
  • Rai
    More drawing by hand tutorials please!!
  • Really cool tutorial!
  • Guido
    nice tutorial! I really liked the artwork to!
  • zach
    cool, thanks! i love the comic style illustrations
  • It's great watching a drawing really come to life during the inking process. Much more gratifying than digital inking I feel.

    Nicely done video tutorial. I hope to see more in the future.
  • SleptOn
    So after you ink it(didn't watch the video yet) then do you scan it and vectorize it?

    I tried just scanning in my pencil sketches in high rez and it picked up even the indents from my erased pencil marks making it hard to redraw.
  • cemiotika
    Just SWEET!, very nice!, keek doing it!.

    CheerZ!,
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