Inking I Part 4: Scanning
Figure 1: I snuck through and inked the rest of the page between the last part of the tutorial and this part. Here it is. The final panel will be filled with ominous tones at the end, becuase it will contain words of warning that one character is giving to the other. You can see all the spots and lines along the edges of the paper where I tested the pen. It’s a good habit to first dip your pen into the ink, then draw a short line on the edge of the page or a piece of scrap paper, because sometimes the ink gets blobby and comes off the pen onto your paper. I also have to tap the refillable manga pens against a piece of paper sometimes when the ink cartridge has air bubble in it. You probably shouldn’t do this on the same paper as your comic page, though, because little spots of ink tend to fly everywhere and get all over your panels.
Figure 1:
Figure 2: Here are my scanner settings. As I explained earlier, I print my underdrawing in a light cyan ink and set my scanner to scan in Black & White. The picture that ends up on my computer will be made of pixels that are entirely black and white; no shades of grey. I tell the scanner which pixels to pick up by adjusting the threshold: in other words, by telling it at which point to scan a color as black or to leave it alone and treat it as white. At 123, the scanner ignores all the blue lines and picks up all the black lines. I’m also scanning at 300 ppi (pixels per inch) because the printing company I’m using to print this want their files at 300ppi. If I were working for a company that asked for 1200ppi, like Tokyopop, I’d scan at a higher resolution.
Figure 2:
Figure 3: This is the preview image in the scanner. You’ll note that you can’t see any of the details that I so carefully drew in. This is normal. The only way to really adjust the threshold is to adjust it, scan and check the scan, then re-adjust, scan again, and check the scan, until you get to something you like. But once you find the right setting, as long as you’re scanning the same sort of image, it’ll work just fine for other scans.
Figure 3:
Figure 4: And here’s the scan! I haven’t done any cleaning up on this, and you can see how it completely ignored the blue lines and picked up only the inks.
Figure 4:
Figure 5: I’ve done some cleaning up here, erasing places where I messed up, like the roof and the smeared bedposts, as well as small areas where lines overlapped or I accidentally drew over other shapes.
Figure 5:
Figure 6: I’ve added detail to the roof in this picture. I just copied-and-pasted lines from other parts of the page, rotating them to fit the angle of the roof planks, instead of drawing them in. It’s easier to cut-and-paste than to attempt to match the pen strokes. 
Figure 6:
Figure 7: And here’s the final page, after it’s all been cleaned up and I’ve put the tones into the final panel. Panel 4 doesn’t have a background because it’s a flashback and I didn’t want it to be too pinned down in time and space. I don’t have a background in panel 3 because after you do a nicely detailed background in an early panel, you can do a few in the same scene without backgrounds at all, or with just slight indications of the background. Later on, when the tones are applied, the space behind the beareded figure will be filled in with ominously-patterned tones.
Figure 7:
Hope this tutorial has helped, or at least entertained you!
Inking I: Introduction
Part 1: Tools
Part 2: Starting Out
Part 3: Details
Part 4: Scanning
