Inking other artists

For those of you not comicbook savvy, the comicbook art process works like this- because comics are usually monthly books, the art chores are broken up into different jobs. There's the penciller who's really the star of the show, he/she does all the groundwork, decides on panel layouts (with the writer), angles and basically draws everything. There's the colourist who colours all the comic pages (these days on computer) to look nice and shiny for print. And in between these two is the inker.

What the inker does is interpret and embellishes the penciller's scribbles (and sometimes that's all they are) into ink drawings which reproduce better in print. The inker is an artist in their own right and is usually called upon, not to just 'trace' the pencils (as inking is sometimes misinterpreted as) but to determine lineweight, shadow placement, and even to correct minor or major errors that the penciller has made. So basically, a crappy inker can ruin a great penciller's work, and a great inker can make fairly amateurish pencils shine.

Which brings me to my joy of inking other artists' work. Sometimes it's nice to just let someone else do all the hard work and to just be able to concentrate on refining and enhancing their pencils through ink. I've never done it professionally, and the following examples were done only for fun.


Here I've inked a Mark Bagley 'Spiderman' (one inked in pen, the other in Photoshop), a panel from a 'Punisher' sample page by Aussie artist Andy Finlayson, and a page from Steve Rude's 'Nexus'. Heaps of fun.