Drawing advice, please?

[cpctail]

I've been drawing for a few years now. Still have very far to go before I actually consider it great. Currently I have coloring, shading, highlighting pretty good. But there's one thing I need to know. How do you get good, smooth, professional looking line art? How do you do it? I use a tablet pad and draw with Photoshop. Could anyone give me some tips, please?

[Dragoneer]

I've been drawing for a few years now. Still have very far to go before I actually consider it great. Currently I have coloring, shading, highlighting pretty good. But there's one thing I need to know. How do you get good, smooth, professional looking line art? How do you do it? I use a tablet pad and draw with Photoshop. Could anyone give me some tips, please?

The single easiest way to get solid line art is to ink while zoomed in. Use a solid brush in Photoshop, and ink at 200% or more -- this will help you keep your lines steadier and lessage jagged.

I tend to ink at 8.5x11 at 300dpi (3200x2400 pixels) or larger. This gives me a lot more control.

And as always, practice makes perfect.

[AquaPhin]

heres what i do. i first sketch on paper. then scan it and save it. then go to paint and zoom in on the outlines. you darken them with black. then you whiten the whole body without messing up the outline. then hen your done with the whitening part you choose the color you want and fill it. thats what i did. i did 2 of these. 1 with cyrins head(2 hours) and one of me full body(11 hours).

I'm called an 'Uncanny Shader" when I do my work, it's all digital. I make a blob with solid and use smudge to form it into the shape(s) I want and then I get airbrush with a color a bit darker and shade randomly around the edges, the around the spots I think should be shaded, then I get the main color to touch up, and then a lighter color where there should be shines, and then I touch up again... Viola!

For normal drawings (line-art) I do as normal, but after coloring, I use a white color pencil over the color, it blends them together and hides the white spots, also makes it smooth. I also love charcoal, mmmm, I'm a chalk artist on the sidewalk too :P so... Haha.

Those are just my tips

[cpctail]

Thanks for the tips. I'll give them a try see which helps.

Another question though is, even though you guys just gave me tips, by anychance would any of ya know where I can find some tutorals of such. I'm the type that looks at the pictures trying to put something together, and pretty much the same way when it comes down to learning things :P

Some side7 folks put up drawing tutorials on their pages... That's all I know.

[Aoi]

Normally, I use what they call paths. I use the GIMP. They're, I believe, Bezier curves. In Photoshop it's the Pen tool. I can't quite explain it, but if you'll google "Pen Tool Tutorials" I'm sure you'll get some results.

[Myr]

The best thing I've found is to do line art at high resolution. My most recent image is working at 3500x3000 pixels but the final version I put on the net will be around 1600x1200 or something. Otherwise, GIMP 2.2 has a line path editing feature in which you can have it draw lines for you. That's a really nice feature except on more complicated creatures like dragons where you have a lot of lines. :P

If you do lineart at high resolution make sure you use the paintbrush tool as I've found that really helps especially if you plan to color.

[Shiriko]

I can... draw... stick figures... ;.; Ok, so I'm not an artist XD

[cpctail]

Hey Hey Hey!! Who says stick figures isn't art! Stick figures is like in the fun part of art XD

[Shiriko]

Good point! XD I'm a stick figure artist! Woohoo! I'm definetally putting that for my title when FA is up :3

[Khimaira]

i could give you one, dont draw yiff until you make the anatomy nice, not like others who just draw a penis and boobs and submit it on FA just to get attention