I have realized that many people still have mistaken the stuff in my gallery as inked artworks. Well, except for a few pieces, almost all of them were drawn with pencils, and then darkened with Photoshop. Here is a fanart of Bayushi Kachiko from the trading card game(TCG) Legend of the Five Rings as an example to show how it looks like before and after adjustments and cleanup.

This is actually one style in which the pencils aren't really that thick and dark. I used a 0.5 mechanical pencil with an F lead. On the left is how it looks like after being scanned in grayscale. Admittedly, this particular piece is kinda hard to darken and clean up because not all the lines are black enough(especially the background).

I first adjusted the levels just enough to make the darkest areas flat black(like her hair). Next, I sampled and selected the black areas and around 6 varying shades of grey, and then placed them in seperate layers. I then erased the greys and smudges on all the white areas of the background layer to clean it up. I know that there is surely an easier way to do this, so helpful tips are most welcome.

On the right is the final image result. Not really that perfect, but at least Kachiko's lines look crisper, and the :scribbles: in the background didn't fade that much. ^^:

Hope that all made sense. Anyway, I'll probably do another example like this using the style with the much thicker lines.