The Deadspot Guide to Sparkly Inks
tutorials ·Introduction
Mastering inking techniques is crucial for artists looking to create polished, professional-looking artwork. In this comprehensive inking tutorial, I’ll show you the four essential elements I blend to add dazzle and sparkle to my NSFW linework. Dead lines, Outlines, T-overlaps and Spot blacks are the ingredients I use that make me feel joy when I look back at my ink drawings. If you’re feeling underwhelmed by your inks or want to try a different approach, the Deadspot method will inspire you. Follow this step-by-step guide with a sketch of your own, and save the handy reference card for a clear inking process. Let’s go!
Terminology
Dead lines are ink lines with little to no variation in width, resulting in an even thickness. They’re commonly used in 2D animation but often avoided in comics and illustration. Starting with dead lines allows you to focus on getting the forms and shapes right without worrying about line weight variations.
Outlines are the outer contours or silhouettes of the character, containing the character’s shape. Adding line weight to outlines helps lock your character into a pleasing silhouette, making their body shape easily recognizable at a glance, even on a detail-packed page.
T-overlaps occur where the end of one line touches the middle of another, forming a T-shaped intersection. They indicate the edge of a form or detail going behind or in front of another. In the Deadspot method, we add line weight to T-overlaps to create visual interest and depth.
Spot blacks are areas on a comic page filled with pure black, mainly used for shadows but also for hair, clothing, or accessories. These high-contrast areas pull the viewer’s eye and can be used to highlight focal points of the character, such as the face or other important features, making them particularly useful for NSFW work.
The Deadspot Method step-by-step
I’ll demonstrate the process using a detailed drawing of an enigmatically tearful Princess Zelda kissing Link. This complex illustration features a dramatic downshot, a prominent hand, and numerous small details. While I decided to showcase the method with this more intricate piece, it works equally well on regular single-character poses, which I’ll show at the end.
Preparation: Start with a tight sketch
To prepare for inking, I like to do quite a tight, technical sketch. I want to have all the proportions near enough set in stone and as many details as possible already defined. My sketches tend to start off loose and flowy with a certain kind of sketchy grace, then get turned into these more academic drawings for me to ink - they are my inking guide more than being pretty pieces on their own. It takes time to refine a drawing like this, but for me a few added tie-down stages are really worth it. I often add shading or colour to the sketches to help me visualise all the forms properly and catch errors, and this is added back later if I colour or tone them. It doesn’t matter how you get to this point or what your sketch process is, if you feel happy that everything is placed where you want it, as best as you are able - you’re ready to ink!
1. Dead Lines: Removing Line Weight from the Equation (for now)
Now we flatten everything, turn down the opacity and ink the whole thing with a small brush with very little pressure sensitivity. I set mine to 10px and am usually working on a 2500px or so area of the canvas when I do illustrations. The brushes I use do have some variation but I keep my hand pressure even and just allow any subtle variations to carry through. For comic pages where I want clean edged lines I used Clip Studio Paint’s Millipen, and for illustrated work and fanart I usually use Xa’s ‘Real Pencil’ brush from this pack: https://xaxaxa.gumroad.com/l/dLPlo
I zoom in close when I ink, so the tight sketch and defined details help a lot. I still consider the full image, and zoom out often to meticulously check the lines I’m laying down after every few strokes. I want to see if the 3d forms I’m drawing feel solid and believable, checking if things wrap correctly enough. I draw them on a vector line layer in Clip Studio Paint so I can make minute corrections to lines after they’ve been laid down.
I want a hand drawn feel, I want to capture the natural rhythm of a graceful hand drawn line as well as allow a few little mistakes/happy accidents to occur. So I turn any smoothing or stabilisation of my brush down to zero and focus hard. I use my entire arm, keeping my hand rigid and make sweeping motions from the shoulder. The undo button is your friend! Here’s a video of this stage at 4x speed - in real time I move very slow and careful.
2. Outlines: Defining Silhouettes and adding Line Weight
Now to hit our silhouette and make our character nicely contained in an appealing shape. Simply trace over all the outlines with a heavier lineweight. How heavy should you go? I tend to hold back from super thick outlines, opting for something subtle but noticeably thicker than the dead lines. I want all these elements to work together as a whole and not overpower on their own - but super thick outlines can be a really good look.
For this stage I turn my brush smoothing/stabilization all the way to 100%. I want to trace very closely over the dead lines I laid down in the previous stage - I want to replicate them pretty precisely but with the added line weight and the slight natural inconsistencies of a human hand. When actually tracing and not just following a guide like the sketch layer provided, it is useful to move your hand slow, smooth and precise. The stabilization is for exactly this purpose, so don’t feel any stigma about it. Doing this by hand and not with a software technique will introduce little imperfections and inconsistencies in the line weight where your tracing isn’t precise like a machine would outline, smoothing or not. It adds to the hand drawn feel of the finished piece.
I don’t stick purely to the outer contours, I draw inside the character silhouette too. The head always gets completely outlined - including the jawline and chin to lock that head into its own shape (see Zelda’s jawline). Also if part of the character is coming towards us in 3d space, like Zelda’s hand overlapping Link’s face, that element gets outlined too. Her hand is also a storytelling element we don’t want to get lost, so it gets the thicker outline.
In this drawing I opted not to give Link’s hand on her hip an outline since it felt secondary to the main action, the kiss. It is also physically further away from the viewer in 3D space, so leaving the outline thinner felt appropriate, but when two characters are interacting making their silhouettes stand out from each other can be useful. Also with the kiss and where their heads meet, I opted not to outline Zelda’s nose and lips to enhance the feeling of them being joined together. There are no firm rules, and outlining different elements of a piece can give different results. Experiment, but remember less is more - it’s very easy to see every part as important when you’re zoomed in inking and you can end up adding line weight to 90% of your lines, which doesn’t let the power of a few well chosen thicker lines shine through.
The brush I use in this stage is still the Real Pencil brush from Xa’s pack, at the same 10px size but I press really hard. For an even cleaner look in comic work I use Clip Studio Paint’s G-pen, or the Real G-pen.
Where lines on the outline cut into the character, I let them gently tail out, they flow into the silhouette and trail off smoothly. They extended into the drawing a little ways so it’s not a pure outline like something a software would do.
This process of cutting into the character with our lines is the beginning of our next stage, the one that adds the subtle but essential sparkle, the T-overlaps.
3. T-Overlaps: Adding Micro Contrasts that Sparkle
The spot blacks will serve to pull the eye to the biggest areas of contrast, while the effect of adding line weight to the t-overlaps provides lots of mini areas of increased contrast on top of the dead lines beneath. The inks glisten and make your eye dance around the piece, coasting from one to the other without really stopping to look at any single one too closely. Continuous movement across the piece, bringing back the lively energy of our sketch that so often gets dampened at this stage.
I hit every single t-overlap with some added line weight, I don’t give any consideration to the 3d form or what the lines represent - even if a hand is way in front of the clothing crease line behind it, I will still hit that t-overlap of the hand and the far away clothing crease with added line weight. I approach this stage as a purely 2d design element. I don’t even need to zoom out and check the drawing in this stage, I systematically go over every single T-overlap and give it a line weight boost.
When adding line weight to the T-overlaps, we want to taper the ends of our little lines so they smoothly flow into the dead lines. We want them to stand out but not demand attention, so the sinuous flow from dead line to thickened T-overlap should be smooth. That said part of the charm of hand drawn inks is the human error element. It doesn’t all need to be perfect like an Adobe Illustrator Vector drawing. For this reason I set my brush stabilisation/smoothing back to zero and let some little mistakes and imperfections slide.
4. Spot Blacks: Creating Contrast and Focal Points
Now it’s time to add the spot blacks. It doesn’t need to be pure black, it can be whatever colour you chose for your linework, but single, solid, filled in shapes form these elements. The purpose of this is to add the biggest areas of contrast. Nice, appealing, larger shapes of black that will catch the eye and pull it to that area.
Spot blacks can be tricky shapes to pull off, it’s easy to break the feeling of 3d or introduce odd looking shadows that don’t feel natural. They can be used to draw attention to any area, for NSFW art the obvious places you’d want to draw attention to can all benefit from spot blacks (see the examples at the end). It can take trial and area and skill in shape design to get right, but there is a foolproof approach that will work with any character drawing.
Foolproof Spot blacks
The under jaw area, the eyes and between locks of hair on the brow will always produce pleasing locations for spot blacks. Faces are always of interest to us as viewers so making these stand out is a great default choice to stick to if you’re starting out. Less is more, and these areas of black can dominate, especially against a white background. I don’t often go far beyond these in my own work. Hitting these three places will always work and do the job of highlighting the face.
Eyes
Since cute stylised female eyes tend to be big, the pupils can stand out way too much if they are filled in black and surrounded by the iris that gets left as pure white in this style. She can end up looking surprised or scared instead of anything else and the expression is lost. There’s the option to leave it unfilled, which totally works - just an unfilled circle - but I like to use the shape in the examples below.
A looping area of shadow in the upper iris that merges with the pupil, leaving a heart-like shape of white in the lower part of the iris. It’s romantic, and it mimics real world lighting. The shadowed area of the upper portion of the concave surface of the iris - it’s just enough realism for us to believe it. Together with filling in the eyelashes with black can create a single complex shape of black in the eyes that reduces the clutter of too many small shapes around the eye area. Grouping shadows where possible is always advised.
Neck
This will be very familiar from manga and anime, the deep shadow of the head making a triangular shadow shape on the neck. It works in indoor environments too where there isn’t strong light, since this area is subject to heavy occlusion; it’s blocked from receiving light in most situations, so you can safely apply this shadow regardless of the character’s environment. There are various designs to this shape, looking up some anime screencaps or manga panels for reference and picking your fav is useful if you struggle to get this shape to look how you want it. I like to merge this with shadow areas on the underside of the hair, it makes the face pop out nicely and again grouping shadows is good - it prevents the viewer’s eyes being assaulted by fragmented areas of high contrast.
Hairline
Any locks of hair that cover the forehead are great targets for some spot blacks. We’re indicating the cast shadows of the hair locks on the head, so we should consider the light direction and put them on the side away from the light. However, since this is so stylised, you can get away with adding them on the sides that make the best design or even mixing and matching them with no regard to physics without breaking anything too badly.
Back to Zelda
When all the stages are finished, you should be able to hide the deadlines completely and the drawing as a whole still makes sense. There is visual confusion around Link’s fingers, but every form and overlap is indicated and our brains can resolve the majority of it. This is a kind of test I use to make sure I hit everywhere I intended to hit - although it can make a cool effect to leave it like this if colour or tone is added.
Inking Complete!
And we’re done! It takes a little time but I think the results are well worth it. Clean, crisp, sparkly but with a myriad of little human imperfections that really boost the hand drawn feel.
Here are more examples from past drawings, Some were intended to be coloured and shaded so had slightly different levels of each of the four ingredients - it’s good to mix and match, experiment to see which are the most useful in your process. Doing all four parts and then adding colour and lighting and shading can make things look too busy, so adjust accordingly. And have fun! Look back on your inks and feel proud of what you created.
I really enjoy looking at these, even work I did many months ago I find myself still engaged by the inks and very happy with them.
And there we have it! In summary, the Deadspot method combines Dead lines, Spot Blacks, Outlines, and T-Overlaps to give your inks extra punch. By organizing these four elements, you can take your inking to the next level. I hope you found this tutorial helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out on Twitter, and don’t forget to tag me in your Deadspot method artwork!
Now it’s your turn to experiment with the Deadspot method and make it your own. Happy inking!