DISCLAIMER: As always, this is just my method. If you are better at this than I am, then first of all, fuck you, and second of all, feel free to disregard my advice. THIS TUTORIAL IS FOR PEOPLE WHO SUCK WORSE THAN ME.
P.S. <3 I love you?
STEP 1
Obviously, open your sketch up in Photoshop or whatever, and put some music on. This part is TEDIOUS.
STEP 2: BLUE!
The first thing I do when inking is take my rough draft and change it to a nice color here. The quickest way for me is to just pull up the adjustment with ctl+U and hit colorize and pull the lightness up to 70 or so. It doesn't matter what color, just whatever you want to use.
STEP 3: ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING
Obviously, I do the line art on a seperate layer from the sketch layer, and I even turn the opacity of that layer down a bit if I still don't feel it's light enough. The key thing here is that your sketch is a GUIDELINE. I find that my line art usually looks better if I don't go exactly over the sketch lines. Just make sure to make them crisp and controlled and what not. At this point, for the resolution I'm working with, (1400x1800, 300 dpi) I use a 5px brush to start off with. Make sure you have pressure sensitivity for this.
STEP 4: JUST LIKE, DO THE WHOLE THING
Once I'm done outlining the entire picture with the 5, I take a moment to fill in any blacks I want to do solid. If you guys haven't noticed, I really like to do flat black instead of shaded black. Just a style thing for me. If you don't do it that way, you can still fill any darkly shadowed black areas or whatever you would usually do.
STEP 5: LINE WEIGHT
Line weight is a very tricky subject to address because it's so varied. Most of the time, you just have to experiment and find what works best for you. Definitely don't neglect it though, it makes a huge difference.
Generally what I do is decide where my light source is, and apply thicker brush strokes, (about 9px) to the lines that curve away from the light source, such as if in this picture the light is coming from above, and from the left, so the dips down and towards the right I will go over with a larger brush to make the lines more varied.
- Key point 1: Lines should be darker the further from the light source they are.
Key point 2: Lines should be darker the closer to the camera they are.
The latter is a phenomenon known as 'atmospheric perspective', which dictates that things are less defined the further away they are. This is because your eyes have limited range, so when drawing, if you have a character in the foreground in front of a background or another character, the character in the front should be outlined more thickly.
This also applies to foreshortening. It can be tricky to decide how far back you should go with a certain thickness, but just experiment. This has the added bonus of separating your character from the background.
STEP 6: FINISH
This is what I have to end with, personally, but I'm significantly lazier than you should be, so surpass me with your own drawing!
Next tutorial will be about COLORING. And will likely be very LONG.
Remember, if you have any questions or need clarification on anything OR if you'd like to request a tutorial for something specific, PLEASE feel free to comment. I'm an answery sort of person.
Read from the start!