Digital Inking in Photoshop

For this tutorial, I’ll be using the image of my site’s avatar (see image below), Ves, which was digitally sketched out on Adobe Photoshop. It doesn’t matter whether the initial image you’ll be working on is a traditional (pencil on paper and then scanned in the computer) or digital, the technique is the same for inking.

Set your foreground color to Black. What I’ll show first is using the Pen tool to trace outlines of your drawing and fill it up with black color.

Select your Pen Tool (press P) .

Be sure you are drawing on the Inks layer. Simply add another layer on top of your penciled or rough line art and naming that layer “Inks”. This is to ensure you keep your original lines in case you need to refer to it at some point.

I always start my inking with tracing the eye. This is a reason why I try and make my pencil lines as clear as possible, so that when I trace, I pretty much know how i want the details to look like, an example is the shape of the eyes.

Using the Pen Tool will be a lot easier and faster if you can master using your tablet or mouse on one hand while using the shortcut keys associated with the tool with the other.