Do you have linearts you want to ink over but can't be bothered to use real ink? Well then this article is for you. While there are a great number of ways to ink something on a computer I'm going to focus on how to use Adobe Illustrator to do so. This is only one of the many ways I myself ink drawings and I encourage you to experiment to find the way that works for you. Sometimes you won't even have to ink your drawings if your original lineart is tight enough, but if you draw like I do then inking is an essential step in making your art presentable. Also, thankfully, this is one of the easier things to do with a mouse since I know many people don't have a tablet. The editability of vector art is quite suited to clumsy hands or clunky mice.

Step 1: Prepare lineart

This is the easy part. If you draw in the real world as opposed to on a computer than you are going to have to digitize your art by some means. Scanners usually work best but even a digital camera will work as long as you have a steady hand and a straight on angle. The resolution you scan in with is much less important at this stage since any fine detail lost in the digitizing is going to have to be inked again anyway. And also due to Illustrator's vector nature you needn't worry about sizing your document before opening it in Illustrator. Simply save it as a jpeg or something and open it up in Illustrator.

The first thing you need to do when you open the file is double click on the layer and set it to "Template". This will stop you from being able to draw on it and mess it up, because lets face it, if you weren't afraid of screwing things up you'd be using real ink and not this forgiving computer. Letting the computer stop us from working against ourselves is what computers were made for.

Also while you are at it you can choose if you want to dim the image a little, the default is 50%. I leave it at that.

Step 2: Choosing Your Tool

Create a new layer that you are going to be inking on and we can start going to town on our lines. For this trip to town we are going to be taking our pencil tool.

As you can see it looks like a pencil. I like to drag a little floating window out of the three tools in the pencil drop down menu. The reason I like to keep a window of those three tools is because although the pencil tool has a keyboard shortcut (N), the smooth tool does not, and I didn't care to change keyboard shortcuts, especially if I expect people to follow along with their own default settings.

So we need only concern ourselves with the pencil tool for now but we will come back to the smooth tool laer. Double click the icon to bring up the pencil tool's settings. I have them set for Fidelity: 2.5, Smoothness:0% and make sure that the 'Keep Selected' and 'Fill New Pencil Strokes' boxes are unchecked. If the 'Keep Selected' box is active than every time you make a new stroke you will have to deselect the one you just made, which is annoying.

Step 3: Begin Inking

Now that we are set we can just start going over lines with the pencil tool. At this stage you needn't concern yourself with having smooth lines. Even if you are coming off a caffeine high and have just ridden a roller coaster your shaky hands are not your biggest concern right now. All you need worry yourself with is plunking down lines on top of your drawing.

I find later steps easier if I use as few a number of strokes as possible. So for nice long lines and contours don't be afraid of zooming out and doing them in one big shot, they won't be totally accurate at the moment but that is the beauty of having a computer at your fingertips - you can always give up and surf the net for pictures of cute kitties....

I mean, you can always fix your lines later.

After you've looked at pictures of kitties.

For an example of how wonky lines can be take a look at "jello arms" to the right.

Step 4: Smoothing Lines

Now onto the fun/tedious part. In all likelihood this is the step that is going to either take you the longest or the shortest amount of time, depending on how picky you are.

Remember that smooth tool I mentioned? It's right below the pencil tool and looks like a candy cane. Because if there is anything smoother than a candy cane I haven't seen it.

At any rate bust that bad boy out and find the lines you want to smooth. Select one (and only one) with your selection tool (hold control and click) and start stroking with the smooth tool in the direction you want to smooth. This part is fairly intuitive, so just practice on a couple strokes and you should get the hang of it. Keep stroking until it is as straight as you want it to be then move on to the next line.

At some point you may find you need to tweak the line a little more than the smooth tool allows. When that happens simply use the "Direct Selection Tool" (A). Click the area of the line you want to edit and drag the handles as you see fit. You might find you have to click off and on the line multiple times to select the correct portion of the line. I'm not sure why but Illustrator seems to do this frustrating thing where it thinks I want to move the entire stroke instead of just a single point. When it does this I encourage you to write Adobe an angry letter about the software you probably didn't pay for and move on by clicking off the line then back on the point you want to move.

Step 5: Setting Line Width

This can be as simple or as complicated as you want, but I find this to be the part that is going to give your linework most of it's pop. It is also where Illustrator shines by giving us the abillity to edit our strokes long after they have been created.

My favourite thing to do is to select all the outer edges and thicken them up the most, then move on to the inner lines and weight them according to how close they are to the viewer - closer equals thicker. I find this gives a sense of depth as well as a good silhouette effect of your drawing. Use your own judgment to see what looks right for you. Some people prefer only a sliver of an outline and rely more on colour to define shape while others like linework to stand on it's own.

You can find the line weight options under the "Stroke" palette. You may have to experiment with punching in your own decimal numbers because sometimes the default Illustrator thicknesses are too big or too small.

Also you might like to try experiment using different brushes, which you can find under the "Brushes " palette. I generally like to stay away from anything too obviously detected as an Illustrator brush. By that I mean stay away from applying the same "cool sketchy looking brush" to every stroke in your drawing because it is very easy to see that it is the same stroke pasted over and over, which can make people think you are lazy and rely on a computer to do your work for you, which you are, but you don't want people thinking that.

So I stick to either straight lines, or the ones with slightly tapered ends. You can also find plenty of free Illustrator brushes online with a quick google search which can come in handy for special situations. In this instance I used a couple for Revy's tattoo.

Step 6: Profit

Seriously. Now that you've made yourself a vector lineart you can scale it to any resolution your heart desires (or your computer can handle). If you want to continue you can colour it in any way you choose. Photoshop talks nicely with Illustrator files, and when you open them you can rasterize them to any size you want.

For those of you who want to completely draw and colour your work in Illustrator I think you are ass-nuts crazy and will not support your illustrator addiction. Plus I tend to find fully vectorized illustrations very sterile and "computer assisted" looking. They remind me of high school textbook illustrations. Not to say that colouring digitally with photoshop doesn't give a 'computer assisted' look, just that I like that look better. So I leave Illustrator at just linework.

Thanks for reading! Questions or Comments? E-mail me at turquoiserabbit@gmail.com

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