Luna Ascending WIP 3

I've laid down some initial inks. This took about an hour, and my shaky hand caused a lot of jitter in those lines. I'm going to go back over those with a slightly thicker pen to smooth them out and add a little line weight to help differentiate different parts. I'm also going to fill in the black on the Nightmare at the bottom. It should look a lot cleaner when I'm done. Normally I'd have done all these lines in different sizes from the beginning, but for a piece like this I wanted to get the basic stuff out of the way so I could focus on embellishing the details later. This one probably won't feature the typical "super-bold outline" approach like the rest of my finished inks; I'm mostly going for a finer look.
In order to avoid distorting the paper too much when laying down the solid blacks, I'm using some sketch pad paper that's supposed to be able to stand up to ink and water colors. I had to cut it out of my A3 sized pad into a US letter size in order to have things line up nicely while working on my lightbox. The edges are a little ragged, but it worked alright.
Initial sketch: [link]
Penciled for inking: [link]
And yeah, at this point I was still changing a few aspects of the underlying sketch. Inking isn't just about tracing directly and perfectly over the lines! It has to be approached as a creative process in itself.