Inking & color with gimp

[Tenacity]

Very very cool. Great work.

I presume you have a tablet? I know virtually nothing about this process... a summary about how you do it would be awesome. I know the coloring and shading itself can be a pain and it differs between pictures but what's this "Inking" you talk about? Do you trace the sketch with the tablet or use the Pen tool? Or something entirely different?

I'm quite curious concerning this.

This kind of artwork has lots of potential for stuff...

Once again, Great Work.

actually i've never owned a tablet, i use an optical mouse for all of this =)

"inking" simply means to remove the extra sketch marks and make all of the lines solid black - it gives a far more 'clean' look to the image. You'll notice that the pencil sketches shown initially have a lot of extra lines, and the lines arent really solid - instead they're a greyscale and not very well defined. Inking removes all of those and replaces them with solid black.

I do this by using the 'lasso' tool. I outline an area of the image with a lasso selection, and then de-select any areas that I -do not- want filled with black.

For example, here we have a simple shape:


Imagine that the shape is drawn in pencil (i just used gimp to make a quick example), and you want to 'ink' it.

First you use the lasso tool to select the whole outer circle. After that is selected, you hold control and use the lasso tool again to un-select/de-select the white parts inside the circle. You just want to keep everything in grey selected.
Once your selection is complete, you make a new layer and fill that selection in with solid black, and you end up with this:


The benefit of inking a sketch is that it becomes much easier to color, and also looks cleaner - if you try to color a sketch on it's own, it ends up looking dull and hastily done. It's also difficult to get a clean transparency around a sketch, due to the white background - but if you ink an image, you start out with a transparent background, and you dont have to go through the hassle of 'cutting out' the colored picture.

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