Before we start a couple things about this tutorial:

I use a Mac, so all of my keyboard shortcuts are Command-- while Windoze users use Control. Same difference. The design was done by Tron so that's why all the screenshots are from a PC. If things look wonky please tell him.

"Line art" comes in many forms, depending on how you want to create an image. For this lesson we'll go with a pen and ink illustration of one of my zombies. Remember you can scan in pencils, paint, and any medium you choose so don't be confined to one technique. Experiment. Come up with you own style.

Before you scan:
1. "Filling in your blacks". If you have a lot of negative space that you want to fill with black, I suggest using a good India ink and a brush. The blacks come out much darker and blend nice. You can also use a magic marker, I like Sharpie markers. This will give you a nice rich black in your scan.
2. After drawing and inking your piece cleaning up your artwork is a good idea. Erase any smudges or pencil lines, this will give you a cleaner scan. I suggest using a soft or "gum" eraser for they won't rub off any of your inkwork, if erased lightly. There is a few steps in preserving the quality of you line art in scanning:
1. Most people have an 8 1/2 by 11 scanner. If you can fit your artwork on that it will save you a lot of time. Most or if not all comic book artists work on 11 by 17 artboard. Thus, if you have the money an 11 by 17 scanner will come in handy.

1. The scanner: Scan in you artwork in Photoshop, view it first, if the line art appears to be faded you can adjust it. Most scanners have a contrast setting. I jack up the contrast setting 25%; this will give you a darker line scan.

3. After you're happy with your scanning quality, scan in your artwork or scan in the two halves of your 11 by 17 board. Scan the image in grayscale 300 dpi. 300 dpi is comic book industry standard, some companies range between 300 to 600 dpi. 600 dpi is a little extreme, your file size gets huge.

4. Crop your image with the crop tool, selecting the area that you want as your final image. On comic art board it has blue crop lines, it's always good to go over the blue line when inking, giving the name "full bleed". This assures when that you crop it the image's lines will run straight off the page.

5. Now this is the tricky part. Go to IMAGE then ADJUST then LEVELS. You will notice what looks like a silhouetted black mountain range.

There are three arrows; black, gray and white at the base of the range. Slide the black arrow to the lowest part of the range. Then slide the gray arrow on top of the black arrow. Your image will change and look weird, don't worry. Take your white arrow and slide it to the tip of the black arrow,like so:

Zoom in on your line art to see if you picked up all your detail. If your lines get too blotchy or some lines got lost repeat the levels portion sliding the arrows in different places. You might have to repeat this a few times to get the hang of how your line art levels work, it's a trial and error process. This is to ensure you have clean black lines instead of "fuzzy" lines.

6. Turn your image to a bitmap. IMAGE then MODE then BITMAP. This step knocks out any remaining gray pixels. Giving you a clean black and white scan.

7. Now save that file as a line art file. Ex; zombie_lineart.psd