Ink on the original pencils?

art by Jack Kirby, © DC

Brittany emailed me asking me to clarify what I had said about inking on the originals. Here's my reply:

Hi, Brittany,

You can ink on your originals. It's just very important that you get good xeroxes of them first.

If you don't want to ink the originals, so that you can show both original pencils and inks side by side, then you need to get a scan of your pencils and use Photoshop to make it so that the black lines are blue. You need to have the info palette visible, with CMYK selected in the Info Palette Options. Then in the pulldown menus, select Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation. Put Hue slider to the middle of the scale (not critical to hit an exact number), Saturation to 100, and Lightness to whatever level will make very darkest area is no more that 60% cyan (C). This lays down a pretty heavy blue, one that doesn't quite pick up as black on MY scanner when I scan the inks in bitmap mode (which is how inks are best scanned). You would want to go a lot lighter to get the look, for example, of the inking-exercise boards with the waves, trees and so on that Mick Gray does for his kids. The original will look cleaner if you go for that lighter blue too. But you do want it dark enough to see the details! And be sure to ink with your xerox of the pencils nearby.

You'll need to get it printed out on an 11x17 printer. Most can handle 2-ply bristol just fine. There is even a thick paper setting on some printers, either in the Print dialog box or on the machine itself. Such a printer is a great thing to have, and they are about a tenth the price they were several years ago.

JH