Step 04: Inking Basics

The next thing we're going to do is draw the lines for our character over our sketch. Note that it is possible to ink a sketch or drawing by hand and then scan it in for coloring, but for our purposes inking done on the computer will be much more useful. It's also good to at least try inking on the computer once, because it really helps you learn about the brush system and other inner workings of Photoshop. There are several ways that the inking can be done (and we'll cover a few of them), but before we begin we should learn about the tools we'll be using.

Inking is rather a large topic, so it is broken down into several steps. This page will cover the basics of the tools we'll be using from here on in, then we'll take a look at Photoshop's Brush system, and then we can finally start drawing.

The Tools window should be visible to you on the left side of your screen (if it is not, remember that you can click Window on the Menu Bar and choose Tools). Take a look at the tools Photoshop offers. Remember that any tool that has a little arrow in the lower right corner of its box has more than one mode. You can either right click a button or click it and hover for a second to see all of its modes.

Here's a screenshot of the Photoshop tools window...

Many of the more useful tools are expanded to show all their varieties, and labels are on some other useful parts. It's a good idea to set the tools with multiple varieties to the ones you see selected here, since we'll be using the Brush, Paint Bucket, and Smudge tools later.

The top batch of tools has to do with selection and basic editing. The Marquee tools can select areas in the shape of rectangles, circles, and lines. Any selected area will be outlined with a black and white pattern that some people like to call "Marching Ants." Any actions you do will be confined to that area. The selection can be cancelled by clicking Select on the Menu bar and choosing Deselect, or pressing Ctrl+D on the keyboard (this is a useful shortcut - remember it!). Other important tools in this batch are Move (allows you to drag around a selected area), Lasso (for drawing your own selected areas), and the Magic Wand (for selecting an area of similar colors).

The next batch is the freehand tools. The most important ones are the Brush tool (which draws with color), and the Pencil tool (for coloring solid pixels). The Eraser tool works like the brush tool, except that it turns things transparent instead of drawing. The Paint Bucket tool is good for filling areas with a color or pattern.

Next, we have some vector tools. There are several important buttons in this section, such as Text, Pen, and Direct Selection. Many of these tools work by storing data about lines instead of data about pixels. This means we can resize these items without having to worry about the blurring that often happens when graphics are resized. We'll give you a break and say don't worry about these too much just yet.

Under these are some miscellaneous tools. The Hand and the Zoom tools are very important, because they can be used to pan and zoom your view of the image you're working on. It's good to know the keyboard shortcuts for these: Ctrl+Plus and Ctrl+Minus zoom in and out, and clicking and dragging the mouse while the space bar is pressed will pan the picture. The Eyedropper tool is also good to know, since you can use it to pick colors to work with from an existing picture.

The panel below that shows two overlapping colored squares. The one on top is the foreground color, which is the color that all the drawing tools use. The one in the rear is the background color, which is the color that the eraser uses on a layer that cannot be transparent. These colors can be changed by clicking on them (see below for more info on the color picker). The little double-headed arrow icon above and to the right of these squares exchanges the foreground and background colors. The tiny black-over-white box in the opposite corner restores the foreground color to Black and the background color to White.

Below that are two more tools for selection and editing. These are Edit in Standard Mode and Edit in Quick Mask Mode. You'll usually want to keep Edit in Standard Mode selected, where the drawing tools affect the current layer. In Edit in Quick Mask mode, the drawing tools draw on a red overlay, which becomes the selection when you change back to Standard mode. We won't want this, so leave it on Edit in Standard Mode.

Near the bottom of the Tools window are three little boxes that allow users to select various window modes. With these you can make the image you're working on appear in its own window, or full screen. For most work that you will do on graphics, keeping the image in its own window will be just fine.

At the very bottom of the Tools window is the Jump to ImageReady button. This allows you switch between Photoshop and ImageReady. That's all. We don't need this now.

When we select a tool, the top of Photoshop will offer up a group of options that allow us to customize the tool to complete a variety of tasks. Let's take a quick look at this area...

1. Select the Brush tool. There's a bar near the top of the screen that will change and look something like this bar:

This is the Tools Options Window. Although every tool in the Tool Window has its own set of options here, some are pretty common. On the very left is a pull down menu you can use to store presets of the current tool, which is very useful for defining customized variations of a tool that you'll re-use a lot. The "Mode" is another common one, and works a lot like the "mode" of a layer. It's best to keep this on "Normal" while you're learning.

This window allows you to undo several actions. The list in the window shows the recent actions you've taken, with the most recent on the bottom. Clicking on previous steps undoes any actions done since that step (for example, if you click 4 steps up the list, Photoshop will undo everything you did after that point). A good shortcut to undo the very last action is Ctrl+Z, which is very useful when drawing. Keep in mind that every change you make to a graphic will be saved in the History palette, no matter how small the change. So if you make a large number of tiny changes you may have to go pretty far up the history list to undo them all.

Above is the Color Picker mentioned earlier. When you click on the foreground or background color box, this comes up, and you can select a new color for the box you clicked. Colors can be specified by a number of different systems that use three channels. RGB color is here, and so is CMYK (you can't pick colors from CYMK since it has one too many channels, but the values are displayed). Also here are HSB (Hue/Saturation/Brightness) and LAB (Luminance/A/B). Whichever channel you pick goes into the vertical slider in the middle of the window, and the other two channels associated with it are put along the two dimensions of the square to its left. I usually like to have "H" selected, which puts hue along the bar, Saturation horizontally in the box, and Brightness vertically in the box.

HSV is fairly easy for an artistically minded person to understand. To find the color you want, think of its hue (color) first, and select that, and then find the tone you want within the square. RGB color may be better for the technically inclined, since it deals with the raw values that the computer thinks in. LAB is how color is broadcast on television signals, and is pretty to look at, but isn't very useful for picking colors. Luminance is the brightness of a color, and with A and B set to 50%, would be a color's equivalent in black and white. A is a measure of how much Red deviates from the luminance, and B is a measure of how much blue deviates. The hexadecimal code just below the RGB values is very useful for web developers, since that can be dropped into HTML to specify the exact color you've picked. For most of what we are doing, these values are not all that important, so let's move on...