Hey, everybody, I know there are many here who finish their strips in color, but for those of you who finish in b&w, as my pages are; What do you use to ink with?

People have made comments about my inks so I thought I would share that I actually ink with a rollerball, Pentel's Permaroller Gold, which has permanent ink and which, thus far, has never bled or faded on me. I follow my "base inks" with the pen with brush touch-ups and fill-ins with a Winsor-Newton Series 7 No. 2 , now available at very reasonanble prices from Dick Blick, and Higgins Black Magic ink.

Hal Jones
http://www.drunkduck.com/Beyond_Human/

Character outlines and anything that needs to look soft (clothing folds, hair, plants etc) with a Kolinsky sable brush, then I move to an array of Rothring Rapidograph pens for architecture, tech and finer detail. Generally I don't pitch large black areas on paper, I just scan and fill them in Photoshop as it saves a massive amount of time.

Generally I find that I do more with the brush on pinup pieces than on sequential pages due to time constraints and errors. Inking sequentials has to be as fast as possible while still looking good, so I occasionally fake brush strokes with the pens.

If I had time, I'd teach myself how to use nibs to get better looking hatches.

Now I use Photoshop all the way, but back in the day I used Sakura pens to outline in ink.

Well, although I do colour, I use calligraphy and prismacolor pens to do the inking (not to fill in the black, though... I use a paint tool to do that).

I use a Faber-Castell set if pitt pens that works pretty well for me. I mostly use the fine and brush pens but occasionally the small pitt pen works for very fine details. I've been pretty happy with them during the last several months.

I ink in Photoshop 100%, and Nadya is in grayscale right now, so... check it out, maybe you'll like what you see.

I do my inking very very close up, maybe magnified 300% with a 2-4 pixel brush.

I do alot of stuff like yo D0m

I use prisma ink pens for my comic. Cheap, and easy to use. When I need to have big black areas, I paint with bottled ink. For coloring with inks, I use gray copic markers.

I confess to feeling a bit guilty about my inking technique. This is because I have a complete line of pen nibs and brushes and do know how to ink the traditional way on bristol board, but for my current DD offering I'm just scanning in the raw pencil work, touching up the lines just a tad with my application's white paint feature, and then Gaussian blurring the pencil lines by five pixels and then adjusting fine details with the level's feature.

The reason that I do this is because it's the nearest I can come to making an inked effect look fairly close to the original pencil work. I'm struggling for something that looks more pencil than ink, in other words, but still has that inked contrast to the final product to make everything pop.

I don't know how long I will stick with this strange technique, but for now I am finding the process itself fascinating. Meanwhile all those brushes and pen nibs and bottles of ink and bristol boards are forlornly gathering dust.

==================

Addendum: Actually I have been considering going back to hand inking because I'm becoming less thrilled about the cheat-inking technique of late. Hand inking is definitely better in its results, and by the time I've finished cleaning up the pencil lines, either before or after doing the cheat-inking, I've put just as much effort into the page as if I had inked it the traditional way in the first place.