Thor Digitally Inked in Adobe Illustrator

Thor Digitally Inked in Adobe Illustrator

Here are my digital inks of Thor, the God of Thunder. He’s one of  Marvel Comics’ main characters. A founding member of the Avengers and actually in the very first comic book I ever read. This is the new costume he’s wearing in his new monthly title.

This was a pencil drawing of Thor I did last week. It was a quick drawing using an HB woodless Ebony pencil.  I traditionally use an H6 pencil for light-tight penciling. For this, I actually was able to achieve good detail with the softer lead. It’s good to get out of your comfort zone and try different drawing tools.

I inked this drawing digitally using Adobe Illustrator. I didn’t do it in one sitting. I took my time and did it in small spurts during the week. (Usually watching a Netflix movie on the side). I’ve only just recently started inking my drawings on the computer, which is ironic because being a Graphic Designer for over 10 years you’d think I would have done it years ago.

I like using Adobe Illustrator for inking, I know a lot of people use photoshop which is a great software too. The reason I use illustrator is that I like saving my inks as a vector images. Vector images are great because there are no worries about pixelation. They are always super high resolution even if it’s reduced or enlarged.

For this inking, I only used the pen tool with my mouse or Wacom tablet. It helps to give me the look I want to achieve. I like the sharp edges and thick to-thin lines I get with it. There’s an amount of control I feel I have with the pen tool. I think in my next digital inking I will use only the bush tool. Like I said earlier it’s always good to try different tools. I plan on coloring these inks in the near future using Photoshop.

This blog post was originally published on my former website, Comic Book Graphic Design and has now been migrated here to RSC Arts, Artist Blog.