You might already know that acrylic painting doesn’t use true black. You never paint out of the black color tube. Instead, you mix up opposite colors on the color wheel in order to have control over your dark areas, making them cooler or warmer. Inking is the art of drawing with ink, sometimes from scratch, but also over fine sketch lines made with a red pencil. Inking uses true black contrary to the color painting techniques. But is it really true? While some illustrations techniques use overlapping colors and sometimes blurred contours, visual art using inking have clear and distinctive typically black contours. It’s because paints are meant to be used with brushes while inks are meant to be used with pens or quills. Inking is more akin to calligraphy and allows more details. Painting uses dots and washes. Inking uses dyes while painting uses pigments mixed with the medium used for painting. Dyes or shellac do not behave like acrylic or watercolor. While picture books seem to use mostly paints, illustrators are often asked to draw in black and white. Inking is a skill in demand and some artists are specialized in inking. Why inking? Inking requires the mastery of values. Inking requires an artist to control composition and viewpoint. Inking requires the perfect understanding of dark and light spaces, zones of contrast versus zones of less contrast. Finally, inking requires having a steady hand. That's a lot of skills! Sure inking is mostly linked to manga and comics books as well as graphic novels. Still, find examples of some popular inking picture books below. Beautifully Illustrated Black-And-White Picture Books https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/74975.Beautifully_Illustrated_Black_And_White_Picture_Books Inking doesn’t only use the art of hatching and cross-hatching lines and true black. Inking also uses diluted black ink to fill the grey areas and the shadows on the paper. Diluting black ink allows you to come up with diverse ink gradients. This way, you actually paint with your ink. See the tutorial from on how to sketch in ink and how to make ink gradients and bring more values into your drawings. True black (rich black) is always black in printing, but it can be swallowed by paper. Ah, thirsty paper! Do not underestimate the power of the paper! In printing or making a PDF file, black is not black, but charcoal or dark gray. Why, oh why? Because some of the paper absorbs the color and some of the white from the paper shows through the black ink. This is why when you print your design, it might look grey, not black. In professional Art software, you can set the preference to “Black accurately” when clicking on the setting "Appearance of Black". Rich black, in printing, is a mixture of black with other colors. A rich black might be 100% black, 60% cyan and 40% yellow. You get a warmer black by using more yellow. You get a cooler black by using more cyan. Just to let you know. Now that's you're more the wiser, go ink!
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In 2015, 2016 & 2017
In 2016 & 2017
Illustrator
I am Sussu Leclerc and I started writing and illustrating picture books thanks to the Smart Dummies event hosted on Facebook by amazing Dani Duck. Archives
October 2018
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