Non-photo blue pencil example. Click for larger image.

I draw five comic features, so I need to work fast.  One of the great time savers is the non-photo blue pencil.  It’s a simple and efficient approach.  The blue pencil lines don’t scan.  So, as I draw, I can get as sketchy as I want.  I can draw and redraw a character or background to find the right look. Once I’ve got everything the way I want it, I then pull out my pens and start inking.

I lay a nice black line atop the blue lines.  Funnily, I can find the exact lines I want to ink in black, even though all those blue lines are jumbled up a bit.  At times, I need to pull out a red pencil to refine and define the exact blue line I want to ink.  Or, I simply press a little bit more with the blue pencil and make the line I want inked a little bit darker than the rest.

Once the inking is completed, I do a one bit black and white line art scan.  A one bit scan reads only two colors, black and white.  It won’t read the blue lines. Therefore, these become invisible to the scanner and drop out.  The final result is a nice finished comic strip with black lines on a white background.

It’s clean and complete and ready to be send to newspapers.  And I didn’t have to spend a lot of time erasing unwanted pencil lines.  I can then open this comic strip file in Gimp, add color, resize, and edit to my heat’s content.

From hard to soft, non-photo blue pencils come in a variety of lead grades.  You’ll need to try a few and experiment to find which one is most comfortable.

(Click here to see how the final strip came out.)