Guide for Inking Manga Pictures

I use roughly three pen nibs at the most (as do most mangaka, the artist of Gintama uses only two- the crow nib and the G nib).

What do I use to ink my manga art?

The Crow Nib (also called the Round Nib, best for fine lines such as hair, facial features)

The G Nib (most commonly used pen nib, very flexible but difficult to control)

The Kakuro Nib (good for uniform, thick lines).

Inking Steps:

1) Warm up your pen nibs first. This is to make sure that you get used to handling the pen.

2) Start inking on the LEFT side, so that (assuming you are right-handed) you do not drag your hand through the ink and smear it.

3) When you want to change your line pressure, practice on scratch paper first so you do not ruin your drawing if you make a mistake.

4) Use quick, precise strokes for sharp lines

5) You can break up a line into various shorter lines so your hand-shaking is less evident

5) Use a ruler or a curves template if you must (although I personally don't)

6) If you want to draw a new fold that you didn't sketch in pencil, go ahead as long as you know what you're doing.

Tips:

Hold your pen close to the bottom, so you have more precise control.

If you want to draw clothing folds, use quick, light lines so that the lines are sharper.

Don't worry if you made a mistake, you can fix it on Photoshop with the pen tool, the eraser tool, the clone stamp tool, etc.

Use screentone if you think your picture looks boring afterwards.

Clean up the picture first before you do anything else to it, it'll be a pain in the butt when you spot a smudge, and you already have 4 layers operating because you're coloring the picture.

Why do I use pen nibs?

Because they are pressure sensitive. A huge pet peeve I have with American-made manga style comics and how-to-draw manga artbooks is how it looks like every author only uses a speedball type pen to ink (it's the type of pen that you use to write with).

Speedballs are good in that you don't need to refill it, however, they have no pressure sensitivity and so all the lines drawn are the exact same.

Most, if not all mangaka use pen nibs for their art. Your eyes can probably tell the difference between pen nibs and speedball type inking pens.

Why do most American-made manga artists use speedball type pens? Probably because:

1) Tradition. Marvel/D.C.-type comics use them, and they look fine. But keep in mind: they're also fully colored, which adds a new dimensionality to their artwork. Manga is mostly black and white, and requires more attention to line sensitivity because it has less ways to convey visual information.

2) There has never really been a tradition of using pen nibs to ink comics in the U.S.

With that said, I highly recommend that you use pen nibs, because otherwise, all your lines will look really uniform and flat, which in turn makes your art look a lot less impressive than it could potentially be.

After you are done with the inking process, if you are like me and dislike coloring pictures on Photoshop unless a gun is held to your head, then you will want to add some screentone to the picture so that it looks less boring.