Inking I Part 2: Starting Out
I’ve got my panels inked in and have taken the tape off the paper so I can move it around as I need.
Figure 1: As you can see, I have some lighting issues with the photographs, but you can still get the general idea. 
Above, I have printed the ‘pencils’ (which I drew digitally) in a light cyan color. This is because I will scan the finished inks on the Black and White setting, tweaked so that the scanner only picks up the darkest colors. It will scan just the black ink and ignore the blue underdrawing.
Figure 1:
Figure 2: This is where you can see the hazards of inking when you forget to put the angled side of the ruler against the paper and put the flat side: there’s a large, ugly smears on one of of the bedposts. I’m using one of the Tachikawa refillable manga pens for this, to make thin lines with little variation. To make some lines thicker, to give the illusion of depth and shadow, I go over the lines several times.
Figure 2:
Figure 3: Drawing the major lines of the room. I eyeballed the perspective on this room, which is always a hazardous thing. However, the feel of this particular story goes well with organic shapes and lines, and I think a mechanically perfect perspective drawing might take away from it. I’ve gotten the major lines of the room in - the lines that make of the edges of the major shapes (bed, roof, wall). You can see another smear on the other bedpost, as I corrected the perspective and manged to place the ruler upside down again. I’ll be fixing the mistakes in Photoshop after scanning (and there are quite a few).
Figure 3:
Figure 4: More of the major lines. You don’t really want to start working on the details until you get the big areas down, because it’s a pain to have to go back and fix details. I’m laying in some depth now: you can see how the weird shape behind the figure is turning into a wooden sliding panel covering a window, defined in space by perspective lines and by shadow.
Figure 4:
Next: detail!
Inking I: Introduction
Part 1: Tools
Part 2: Starting Out
Part 3: Details
Part 4: Scanning
