Here is a digitally inked Pinup of an awesome penciled piece of the Fantastic Four by artist Ariel Padilla. I found the pencils on his DeviantArt page and I knew I had to ink it. I used Adobe Illustrator so I could create a vector image. This way it can be reduced or enlarged with no pixelation of the image. This is actually my second piece digitally inked but the first I’ve done in Illustrator. My Batman 2.0 character redesign was my first digitally inked piece but for that I used Photoshop. I have used the Illustrator in the past to create illustrations, logos, advertisements and marketing but this was the first time I incorporated my graphic design skills in to inking.

I have a wacom tablet but for this digital inking I used only my mouse and the pen tool. So basically the piece is all straight vector anchor points. This illustration took about 5 hours, which is longer then I thought it would, but it was fun and a nice practice piece. On my next Illustrator ink I plan on using the wacom table and the brush tool. Right now it is all about having fun and learning to use tools I use in my graphic design work in my comic book art work. My next step will be to create flats for these inks, and maybe color them too.

Fantastic Four Digital Inks

Here are the original pencils by by Ariel Padilla.

Original Pencils by Ariel Padilla

Want to see the steps I took to create the digital inking. Check out my blog post: Comic Book Digital Inking Techniques with Illustrator Vector Anchor Points