Abe, help me out here.

I can't really show anything I've been working on in the past few days (secret projects and all), and I think I may have flubbed prior explanations on the bluelining thing, so let me try again.
Start over.

As with most of life's problems, I'm going to use Abe Lincoln as an example to help illustrate what I'm talking about. (-albeit a crude, hastily done Abe, an Abe nonetheless)

Here are two drawings of Abe. The one on the left was started with blue, then the parts I really wanted there are in pencil. The one on the right is all pencil.




Here are the drawings after lining them with pen and ink.






Now you have to use photoshop to darken the black so it's really black. But darkening the black means darkening everything, blue and pencil too.




I think the part I kept leaving out is that with photoshop, you can get rid of blue. Pencil's gray (black), and you can't get rid of that without getting rid of the black parts you want kept there.




Here's pretty much the important part. The blue is easy to get rid of. If you start a drawing out in blue, no matter what, it can't muck up the final result. Not so much for pencil. If you erase too much or press down to hard or something, you can irrevocably mess up the drawing and make it so that you have to spend a lot of time in photoshop fixing it.

Does that make sense? If not, let me know.

I'm gonna go back to working on stuff I can't show.