A quick tutorial about inking and scanning artwork.

People ask me what I use to do my illustration and how I prepare it.

I like to use smooth bristol board for my art. For my pens I use this pen It's the best brush pen EVER! For the detail stuff I used to use rapidographs, but now I use Faber Castell pens. These have a good line variation where as the radiographs are pure technical pens.

First I pencil the art out as much as I can. Thinking about the shadows and how they'd fall on shapes. That's all technical stuff though. Different strokes, etc...

After the artwork is finished, I do the following in photoshop to make the artwork purely black and white.

• In photoshop Scan the image in at 600 dpi. in greyscale.

• Go to Image/Adjustments and select LEVELS. Eyeball it and move the black slider, the little black triangle on the left to the right. The more you move this the more black your blacks become. Now move the white slider, the one on the right that's white. Move it to the left. Your whites will become less grey. Try and get it as close to black and white as you can.

• Go to Image/mode/bitmap and Make it a bitmap.

• Make it 50% threshold at 600 dpi. This will make your art purely black and white. No grays whatsoever.

• Go to Image/mode/greyscale and make the size ration 1 in the popup. Press OK.

• I usually clean up here, making sure there aren't little off lines here and there.

• Your artwork is now ready to be colored if you'd like. What I do is make it a 300 dpi RGB image and color it using the wacom tablet.