Digital Inking Natalie Portman as Mathilda

This digital inking sample was a practice piece using what I learned at the panel at SDCC recently on the topic.

This was sketched in mechanical blue pencils, scanned, desaturated, levels adjusted. You can see the blue pencil sketch on an earlier post.



Download pixel blender plug-in for CS5. It's only available for CS5. There are several ways to do it, one way is to just run the filter directly to the image, then do threshold or unsharp mask. Another way is to do unsharp mask and threshold first, then run the pixel blender plugin. Select oil paint, only works on RGB mode files. Play with the sliders but usually lower the brush scale, increase the stylization slider.



Although Brian Haberlin called this auto-inking, it doesn't excuse the artist from ignorance or lack of all knowledge and drawing skill. You still have to clean up and tweak it to hide the automated artificial plug-in look. This was just a test so I quickly went through the process. Her right eye is still inaccurate but I left it alone for this test. It takes some playing around to get it to look like the way you want but the results are quite nice. I could have made it purely black and white but I like this three toned look. It has softer and tonal feel than traditional black inks. I think this would be a pretty awesome look for my comic book before colors.