Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

scribbleaddict replied to your post: Minor spoiler I guess

Hey, just wondering…would you be up for giving me some tips on cleaning up and doing your line art, before the coloring process? I’m in the process of learning this whole digital art thing, heh. Thanks if you have time to answer! :D

Had a few people ask similar questions, and really I never know what to say because I just… clean the drawing! I’ll give you my process but I’m not sure how much it will help.

I clean up in Photoshop CS5.1 and I almost always start with a pencil drawing that I’ve scanned in (I’m pretty bad at sketching things digitally), and adjust the values with levels so I can see clearly enough. I make a new layer, have my brush tool set to size 5, full opacity, full flow, no spacing, and off I go!

A general clean up tip that I learned in school was that your hand has a natural ability to draw arcs from the wrist, so if you’re having trouble with a curve, rotate the canvas to your advantage- just like you would spin a piece of paper to get a better angle on it. Really it’s best if you draw from the shoulder, but for clean up I find things are a little different and you require more control.

Other advice would be to try to give foreground objects and characters a thicker line (this helps to add depth to the lineart and thus the picture), and try to feel where the weight of the line should be. This is hard to describe, and can really only be found with practice, but say I was drawing a pudgy rabbit; I would put the weight in the belly of the line, right underneath the rabbit. Some people like to give the very outer-most lines more thickness to really emphasize the silhouette- this gives a chunky, graphic feel to the picture, so experiment and see if you like it.

The best and most boring advice is to practice. There’s something called the ten-thousand hour rule that gets mentioned a lot in animation and illustration; basically there’s a theory that in order to be good at something, you have to spend 10000 hours doing it. Another way I’ve had it put is that you have 10000 bad drawings in you; the sooner you get them out, the sooner you’ll get to the good stuff.

I’m still working on it…