Labels: creating manga

Week Two…

This week I’ve accomplished way more than I expected. Not only are all of the pages inked, but they’re scanned, layed out, and I’ve been able to start adding tone. I find inking difficult to do fast, because it has to be precise.
When I first started doing this, I thought that inking was just like tracing. But now I see that there’s much more involved than following the lines of the drawings that I penciled in. The reader never sees what was done in pencil—all the guidelines and sketching. All they see in the end is the image that’s inked. If the inking isn’t done well, the drawings won’t look right in the final pages. Like for me, I make characters with very subtle facial expressions. There have been times where due to inaccurate inking, I’ve changed a gentle frown to a slight smirk—which are totally different things.
So it was a challenge inking the pages fast and keeping them the way I wanted at the same time. Compared to Mascara, the inking in this manga is very different. For Mascara, I haven’t been paying much attention to the line thickness of the pens I use—until lately. I simply used whatever felt right.
For this project, I used thicker lines on clothes, faces, body outlines, and close ups. Then I save thinner lines for hair, backgrounds, objects, and wide shots. The result has been this very delicate, light weight style.


Right now I’m adding simple tones for shading. After that, I’ll go back to add all of special effect and pattern tones to create more atmosphere, and at the same time, I’ll start adding speech bubbles. I hope to start working on the speech bubbles before the end of this week :D