Process

I have a fairly loose process for making these pages, partly because the Asian ink brush style is usually pretty impressionistic, and also because I’m lazy :D

So I always start with the pencil sketch, I use a light blue pencil so the contrast in the following image is cranked waaaay up, otherwise it’ll be hard to see:

The sketch is very loose (see previous point about being lazy), I mostly use it to roughly map out where everything goes, and I often stray from the sketch when I do the next step, the inking:

I do all the inking with Chinese calligraphy brushes and ink. I like my ink dark – I prefer calligraphy ink because it is usually darker than India Ink from the art store, and even with calligraphy ink a lot of times I’d leave the cap off for a good long while to let the water evaporate and get the ink even darker.

After the ink on the line art dries, I use watered-down ink for the tones:
Sometimes I go back to add details with the regular ink, but otherwise that’s pretty much it. Then I scan and do some touchups in Photoshop, to get to the final image.