Watch them in action on a skeleton driving a supercharged muscle car. Spoiler: your brush is probably fine.
It's past your bedtime. You're zoomed in 800% on one pixel of your line art, questioning your life decisions. Here are five little habits that help inking feel like the fun part again.
In this tutorial:
Ink the part you're least excited about first
Do a rough first pass when you're stuck
Avoid brush paralysis
Duplicate your layer before a big decision
Stop while you're still having fun
Break the drawing into sections and start with whatever you're least excited about: weird mechanical details, repetitive lines, or that awkward spot you've avoided eye contact with since the sketch. It's eating your vegetables before the ice cream. If you start with your favorite parts, all that's left at the end is the boring stuff. Get the annoying bits done early and the rest of the drawing is a victory lap.
You're not defusing a bomb, so you don't have to nail every stroke on the first try. When you're stuck, throw down a quick, messy pass on a separate layer: big shapes, shadows, rough contours, no thoughts, head empty. Then clean it up, or delete it and try again. It's way easier to fix something than to stare at a blank patch like it personally offended you.
A line looks a little off, so you bump the stabilization, tweak the taper, and fiddle with the pressure curves. Twenty minutes later, you're doing open heart surgery on a brush that worked fine yesterday. Pick a couple of brushes you like and stick with them for the whole illustration. If one really feels broken, fix it, but usually the brush is fine and you just drew a bad line, so hit undo and go again.
Save the game before the boss fight. Before you fill in a massive shadow or try a different rendering style, duplicate your layer. Worst case, it looks bad, so hide it and pretend it never happened. Best case, you stumble onto something that makes the whole piece better.
You don't have to keep inking until you're sick of looking at the thing. Deadlines are real, and sometimes you have to lock in and grind. But when you have the freedom, put the pen down before every little line starts to bug you. That way you'll actually want to come back tomorrow, instead of opening the file and wanting to yeet your iPad into a lake.
We inked this one with Ink Bleed, a brush made to capture that old-school printed look, minus the ink-stained fingers. Just remember: if a line looks off, it's probably not the brush.
Next week, this bad boy gets some beautiful retro color. Want more inking techniques in the meantime? Try our 10 tips to level up your digital inking.
Got a weird little inking habit of your own? Tell us in the YouTube comments. The weirder, the better.
