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.