Snippet of Wolverine. Still need to get something right about the pressure of the pen on the iPad. It looks good when I am inking it over the pencils, and then looks squishy when I turn the pencils layer off.

Nice works Mark and Darren !

Darren, doing white lines on black is an interesting idea for issue #3 page 1. I'm on my third pass for that page trying to give the "specter" enough of a different look to set Storm apart. I don't think the pattern worked and glad it was just a layer for you.

Mark, I think the pencil layer is propping up your inks so when you drop it away things change. I can almost guarantee it is line weights. Just by looking at your finished image of Wolverine I would suggest much thinner weights on your speed lines and more variation on the figure rendering. Just as an experiment try to make any interior line a lighter weight than the lines defining the outside of your figure. It won't look right, but it should be very easy to see what interior lines should be heavier if you try this experiment.

In general, those of you using computers to do your inking are missing some of the bounce and variation that naturally occurs with a brush or crow quill. I'm no professional inker, but when I compare what most of us are doing and pages from inkers I admire the differences almost always come down to line weights and how the accumulation of those variances make up the entire image. There are lots of high rez scans of original art available in books or even on Heritage Auction. Print some of your work on 11x17 paper and compare them with original art. Find similarly sized figures to see the differences.

I'd love to see the whole page.

In general, I agree, and I keep going over my work after I turn the pencils off, to try to improve as "inks only." But I think I can take it way further.

For those attempting to ink the 'old-fashioned' way as I am, you might be interested in these. I stumbled upon them in the local Five & Below store yesterday and so far, I'm pretty impressed, and they're definitely easy on the budget!

Matt, that is my intention, but I am learning more than trying to do final product right now. I've spent the last two months with the crow quill and have started with the first 5 pages of issue #3 as a submission for review. I've done page 1 three times now because each week I get better with control and consistency. I finally have a tiny callus on my fingertip from practice. =)

I have all of issue #1 printed on boards in blue and I sometimes do panels, balloons and small backgrounds to warm up, but I don't feel like my skills are at a point where I want them to get through that issue end to end as a final product. I am liking how my pages for issue #3 are coming along and will most likely finish that issue before any of the other ones. I would love to get up to a page a day to keep up with JB's release schedule, but I'm not that fast yet and I have a day job!