The 2nd stage of this piece which is Inking. I use PaintTool SAI rather than photoshop for inking because SAI has more customization for the brushes and they're sharper than photoshop. This inking took approximately a full week to complete. Usually my sketches are clean enough to go straight to coloring, but I'd always recommending inking because it looks a lot cleaner. The base inking is just the inking around the characters. The 2nd layer of inking was all that black space between characters. It'll be changed to match bigger character in the back's jacket but for now it's just black. 3rd Layer of inking is the black sword at the bottom so I can determine how far the effects of his energy sword will reach. (It was not drawn in the sketch stage.) And finally the 4th layer of inking which was darkening certain parts of the characters, (Ie, under the necks, portions of the hair, dark folds of clothes,etc)