Inking — Part 1 of 3

Paolo Rivera frames inking as a necessary part of comic book publication that grew out of printing limits and later became a style of its own. He treats it as a way to select what matters in an illustration, reduce everything else, and keep the viewer focused on the scene and the characters.

He also says the time-lapse in the post is about his thought process more than the physical act of inking. His examples show digital sketches, layouts, and pencils for the cover, and he notes that working with fewer value options pushes composition choices and clarity, even when the final art is cleaned up by his father.

Reading notes

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• Inking was necessary in comic book publication because early printing methods could not reproduce subtle pencil grays.
• The practice continued even after technology improved.
• Inking also has older roots in printmaking, from woodcuts to engraving.
• Those techniques began as responses to medium limits and later became styles in their own right.
• Rivera defines inking as a distillation of seeing, not a rote copy of nature.
• It isolates what matters in a scene by exploiting differences between objects.
• Animated films can hold attention because viewers care about characters more than strict visual realism.
• Even detailed prints by Dürer are treated here as a kind of hyper-reality and exaggeration.
• Inking is about choosing what matters in the illustration and leaving out the rest.
• The time-lapse at the end is meant to show the thinking behind inking.
• The post does not focus on brush choice or paper.
• Rivera inks over a refined sketch in Photoshop with a Cintiq 13HD.
• He says the main concern is clarity, so the viewer sees what he wants them to see.
• Loose or rough inks are possible, but two value options can focus composition.
• Rivera moved from rendered paintings to line work in 2008.
• He thinks that change later helped when he returned to painting.
• Fewer value options can encourage better composition.
• Strong lighting can sometimes rescue a weak composition.
• A strong sketch has a better chance of becoming a strong finished piece.
• For this cover, he normally does not pencil digitally, but did so because he was between studios.
• He says the piece could have been finished from the digital pencils, but his father inked it because the style was cleaner and because they like having original art to sell.
• The total time for the piece was 18 hours, not counting the inks by his father.
• He lists the time spent on layout, digital sketch, digital pencils, and digital colors.
• He plans two more posts on the subject and invites questions or topics for the next one.