Oh Hey, a New Drawring

Posted by Castypher on April 26, 2011, 8:58 p.m.

Screwing off on Minecraft a bit more now that school's out. I've had good times and bad times. Mostly bad, though. The dense forest I keep planting always gets set on fire somehow, whether it's by a random plume of lava, a tree that grew too high and touched netherrack, or a person trying to light themselves on fire.

So I've turned my attention away from that forsaken place and have been working on some arena. And today, this.

In other news, I've been using my free time to pick up sketching again. I tried something new this time though. Instead of using the GIMP/InkScape combo I have been, I used my school's copy of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Photoshop is quite a bit easier to navigate than GIMP, I think, but I had to do it all on the Mac side, which was actually very fun.

I started by scanning the drawing, using the live trace feature in Illustrator, and coloring it in Photoshop.

It didn't come out very well. Here is the full-sized image I worked with.

The lines are far too thick and I can't coax Illustrator to make them any thinner while not disappearing (or doing that annoying-as-hell thing where they fill larger areas). On top of that, I had a few issues when I touched up the outlines in Photoshop. Some of them came out a little blocky, and a few body parts are slightly out of proportion.

Now as for what I think is good, I liked how the eyes turned out. This time I did them from scratch instead of the full color then dodge/burn approach. It was hard. The shading took a good amount of time as well, but I didn't end up putting a lot of time into anything but the hair. Even that didn't come out so well.

Anyway, I'm going to invest in a tablet soon, because I hear those are extremely helpful in these situations. But here are some things I'd like to know from fellow artists:

- How do people create the awesome images without the annoying outlines (search a lot of anime images; there are absolutely no visible outlines)?

- How, in Illustrator, do you reduce the weight of the outline to something manageable without losing line quality or having to trace yourself?

- What programs, if not Illustrator for inking and Photoshop for coloring, would you recommend? I've been told to use Illustrator for everything (though I disagree), and I hear Paint SAI is good.

- Do you do the lineart with a tablet or just the coloring?

- Any other advice?

I guess that's it for now. I'll try redoing the whole sketch later, maybe with a little more pencil precision, or maybe just scrap scanning altogether and use a tablet, which I have no idea how to get started with. All I know is that I color with it.

'Preciate the help.

Comments

Cesar 13 years, 5 months ago

…why is there a stone penis in the background and why is the tip on fire?

Quietus 13 years, 5 months ago

i think it looks fine the way it is, you shouldn't change the lines. maybe that's just me lol.

i'm the one who's been playing on Extravisual's/Malurth's account lately :P

Castypher 13 years, 5 months ago

Oh, no wonder Malurth was suddenly so nice. It had me confused.

Guess the thick lines set it apart just a bit. If I can touch it up some more, maybe I'll keep it.

And Rawr, that's a FLAMING TOWER. The penises are closer to the town (have CPS take a pic for you).

Alert Games 13 years, 5 months ago

Thats cool. It would be fun to ride the skyway and look at all the art work along the way ^_^

sirxemic 13 years, 5 months ago

Quote: Cyrus
It's a dinosaur!

Castypher 13 years, 5 months ago

Xemic, you just made my day.

SteveKB 13 years, 5 months ago

-on your first question do you mean art without lineart? what some artists do is instead of colour below the lineart layer they colour over it so that the line art ends up going away. other techniques include drawing sketches and just being a fucking beast with colour (I can't do this way yet :C ).

-ok here's how drawing work try and draw large images and then scale them smaller after you finish this make it look like there is more quality per pixel and your mistakes will be less noticible (random artifacts will fade away when scaling down)

-Piant tool sai is pretty affordable ($72) if you plan to actually pay for it like I did. and it's very robust. a lot of great artists use it but they also use photoshop. illustrator is usually used for design logos etc. but you can do the same in photoshop if you know how.

-you can do both lineart and colouring and whatever else with a tablet

-keep praticing and make sketches and stuff. When I draw I usually create a sketch then a lineart sketch then the actual lineart. then I do a lazy colour sketch before I do the base colour and then shade afterwards and add in effects.

watch me on DA lolol http://stevekb.deviantart.com/ C:

Ferret 13 years, 5 months ago

Rofl Zemic you made me laugh loudly in a library.

Castypher 13 years, 5 months ago

Quote:
try and draw large images and then scale them smaller after you finish this make it look like there is more quality per pixel
That's actually what I do, since these images are too large for most of my game windows (though I want full-sized images complete with backgrounds for more serious sketches). This was the exception so far, and I haven't seen what it looks like scaled down, mostly because I don't have a program that does it properly (unless Photoshop does it, which I haven't tried).

An those images you drew are pretty much exactly what I'm aiming for. Or, rather, take what's in my banner, for example. Little focus on outlines, more focus on detail.

I wonder if Photoshop has a tracing tool like Illustrator, because although Illustrator's is nice, the vector format seems to screw things up quite a bit, and the lines are too thick. Should I try without the automatic tracing? Because when I manually inked it, it took about twice as long, and the quality was pretty low. Although I could make the lines as thick or thin as I wanted, automatic tracing is just so much more precise.

Moikle 13 years, 5 months ago

PAINT.NET!

I have cs3, but I still use paint.net. In fact I prefer it to photoshop in a lot of situations.

hmm, painttool sai… never tried that, ima check it out.

and oh my god! i want a cintiq too.