Took a break from sketching books, and started cleaning up the voted-upon Vlad & Yelena sketches. I'll have a more comprehensive post shortly, once I've been able to get a little further along, but here's a before-and-after sample.
Left, of course, is more or less straight out of my pen, and right is digitally cleaned up.
I should point out that, while my by-hand inking has never really been top-notch, some of the inconsistencies in the raw sketch is due to the book itself. I don't want to fold and crease the back cover, so I have to hold the bulk of the book in one hand, and sketch with the other. And that causes the back cover to 'dome', or curl up a little, which makes sketching a little iffy.
I've been experimenting with weights and blocks, some of which have helped, but nothing's yet a solid fix.
It's also worth noting that these sketches are photos, from an 18MP camera- they're considerably higher resolution than I generally work with for the comic. :)
And... I've combined Vlad and Yelena into a single image- they belong together- so if I have time later this week, I'll also clean up Pirta's third-place pic. :)
Doc.