Monday, April 11, 2011

Line Drawings in Illustrator

Original tutorial by:Dani Jones

Creating Line Drawings in Adobe Illustrator

This is one grumpy dude. He was created in Adobe Illustrator with the brush tool. I don’t use the program a lot, but when it comes to “inking” my drawings, I find it very useful. Here’s an in-depth look into the making of this cute little grandpa guy including:

How to place a sketch into a new document
Some digital drawing tips
How to fix little mistakes after you’ve drawn your stroke
Ways to finish and color your drawing

Preparing to Draw

I start by placing my sketch into a new Illustrator document. Go to File–>Place. Find your sketch file. Before you click OK, make sure the box that is marked “Template” is checked. Notice that your sketch has been placed on its own layer and has automatically been locked and changed to 50% transparency.

Be sure to select “Template”.

Locked and ready.

Get your tools ready. The default brush set will not do for most artists. Create a variety of brushes to use for your drawing, or open up ones that you have saved. For more about creating and modifying your brushes, see my brush tool tutorial.

My brush palette features round calligraphic brushes in different sizes.

Laying Down Your Brush Strokes

To ink drawings in Illustrator, I like to use the brush tool. I like it better than the pen tool because it better simulates the traditional inking experience and results in looser drawings. Learning to trace a drawing on the computer with a tablet can be really frustrating. You may have to try several times before you get just the right stroke. Just keep practicing using your tablet and eventually you will find yourself pushing Undo less and less.

Some Tips to Get You Started

Try “drawing” with your brush, as opposed to just tracing your sketch. Try not to be too stiff and concentrate on staying loose and spontaneous. Try not to break your flow by fixing every little mistake. Just push through, and you can go back and fix it later.

Don’t concentrate so much on making an exact tracing of your sketch. Stay as loose as possible.

Use a variety of line. I’ve made a custom brush palette with several different sizes, from a bold 7-pt line to a very thin .5-pt line. You’ll notice that any drawing I do has a balance of thick, medium, and thin lines. Also put some variation within the strokes themselves. Use a tablet and set the brush to be affected by your pen pressure.

Notice the use of both thick and thin lines in my little drawing.

Lay down each stroke with confidence. Your lines will be smoother and more stable. Try to keep your strokes longer, instead of shorter. When drawing with your tablet, try to use your whole arm, and not just your wrist.

Take advantage of the shape tool for those objects that are just too difficult to draw with the brush tool. I’ll usually resort to the shape tool for circles, ellipses, and squares. You’ll notice that I use the ellipse tool for the table in my Bake Sale video.

The table in my Bake Sale Drawing was done by drawing two ellipses.

Fixing Your Drawing

When you have finished laying down your drawing, you can now go back and fix any small mistakes you may have made.

Using the Brush Tool – Highlight the stroke that you want to fix. Now, simply “redraw” a brush stroke over it. Notice that the stroke that you highlighted changes. I find this tip useful for fixing slight curves, or changing the endpoint of a stroke.

I used the brush tool to lengthen this stroke.

Changing the Thickness – If a stroke is just slightly too thick or thin, highlight it, then select a different brush. The stroke will change to the size of the new brush. You can also use the Stroke palette by changing the “1 pt” to another value. “2 pt” will double the thickness, “.5 pt” will half the thickness, and so on.

The Pen Tool – If need to remove just a portion of a stroke, use the pen tool to add points to the path. Use the Direct Selection tool to delete the unwanted parts.

The ellipses I draw went straight through my pie. I used the pen tool to fix the overlapping areas.

Keeping Your Drawing Organized – Layers and Groups

If your drawing is a bit complicated, it will benefit you greatly if you stay organized. Group paths that are part of the same element, such as a person or an object, by selecting all the paths and going to Object–>Group (or pressing command+G). Now, when you click on one of the paths using the Selection tool, the whole group will be selected. This will make it easier if you need to move or resize your object. It will also keep your Layers palette more organized. If you want to add paths to your group later, click and drag them in your Layers palette. If you need to select a single path, use the Direct Selection Tool or ungroup by going to Object–>Ungroup.

How to Use Your Finished Drawing

You can experiment with different ways to finish your illustration. If you just want to color your drawing with solid colors, I like to use the pencil tool in Illustrator. Create a new layer and place it underneath your drawing. It may also be a good idea to lock your drawing layer, so you don’t accidentally modify it. Pick a fill color and set your stroke color to empty. Draw your shapes underneath your drawing. If you accidentally color outside the lines, you can modify the shapes in the same way fixed your brush strokes. Select your shape, then redraw your edges with the pencil tool to fix it.

Also experiment with different inking styles. Try different sizes and types of brushes to create different effects. In the picture below, I used a very thin brush to add some cross-hatching to my drawing. I liked how it gave it a more hand-drawn feel.

I also like to copy and paste my drawing into Photoshop. The beauty of creating your drawing in Illustrator is that you can resize it any size canvas you like. I keep it on it’s own layer and paint underneath.

This is an example of a drawing that I brought into Photoshop to color.

I hope this helps you create more interesting line drawings in Illustrator.

Inking In Adobe Flash

1. Setting Up the Sketch

First, create a new document in Flash. The size and other settings aren’t that important.

Next, choose ‘insert’ and select ‘new symbol’

When the new symbol dialogue pops up, create a symbol called ’sketch’ with behaviour set to ‘movie clip’

Now I’m going to get the sketch I saved in Photoshop. If you’re sketching in Flash you can skip this step.
Choose ‘Import’, then ‘Import to Library’, and select the sketch file. That image will appear in the Flash Library (hit CTRL-L to view the library).

There should be two items in the Library now- a movie clip called ’sketch’ and the drawing you’ve imported from Photoshop. In the Library window, double-click on ’sketch’ to open up the movie object. Then, drag your drawing (in my case jerbilay.png) into the main work space. You can use Flash’s transform tools to rotate or scale the sketch, if needed.

In the top left, above the timeline, click ‘Scene 1′ to return to the main screen.
Now, drag the ’sketch’ object from the library into the workspace. You’ll see that since it’s a movie object, it has some different options from the drawing ‘bitmap’ object type. You can adjust those options using the Properties menu (CTRL-F3 or Window > Properties)
Click on the ’sketch’ object in the main workspace to select it.
Then in the Properties menu, set the mode in the ‘Color’ dropdown menu to ‘Alpha’. Adjust the alpha until the sketch appears light gray- mine is set to 34%. Lightening the sketch makes it much easier to ink over later. If your sketch is light already, you can skip this step.

My sketch is pretty big, there’s not quite enough room in the main work space. So, I’ll convert this to another movie object. Click your ’sketch’ object to select it, and choose ‘Workspace’ > Convert to Symbol. I’ll call my new symbol ‘inks’, and make it a movie object.
Double-click ‘inks’ in the Library window, and it should open.

Check out the timeline at the top left. There’s one layer already, which has my ’sketch’ object inside it- I called that layer ’sketch’ too.
Click the ‘new layer’ button, and create another layer on top named ‘inks’. This is where the magic’s gonna happen!

2. Inking Tools and Tricks

Locking a layer prevents any inadvertent editing. Click the dot underneath the lock icon to lock your sketch layer.
Zoom in at the level you want for inking- I usually choose 200%.
Now, set up the brush tool- I select the smallest brush size, and activate the ‘use pressure’ option, which is the button that looks like a swoosh.
Make sure your ‘inks’ layer is selected, and ink away!

Using multiple layers for inking makes it easier to manage some complex illustrations with overlapping shapes, BUT remember that the Flash eraser tool works on all visible layers. Make sure you Lock layers you don’t want to erase!
Changing the color of the ink is easy- click the ‘inks’ layer, and change the color using the fill bucket tool.
You can use the Selection tool to pick areas you want to ‘Smooth’ or ‘Straighten’. It’s pretty handy sometimes.
The brush size scales according to the image zoom, so if you need to zoom in or out to work some details, you might need to adjust your brush.
Undo is your friend! If you want a particularly smooth curve, just sketch it a couple times, and press ‘CTRL-Z’ to undo the weaker lines. It may take a couple tries for the best result. Sketch, undo, sketch, undo, sketch until it looks just right.
Add friction. If your strokes are too quick, and are getting overly smoothed by Flash, put a piece of paper on top of your drawing tablet. The extra friction on the surface with slow your strokes and give you greater control over their appearance.

When you’re finished inking, you can delete the ’sketch’ layer, leaving just the inks.
Then you can finish coloring your work in Flash, ‘Export’ the image as a PNG and color it in Photoshop or another digital program, or even print it out and color with traditional media.

Supplies

To get the best results for your comics,you have to be well organized and be well stocked up on your supplies!for all you draditional pencil and paper comic artist here is a great site to stock up on that ,specializes in comic supplies!

http://www.bcemylar.com/cas/pencils.cfm

Thursday, April 7, 2011

LOADING BRUSHES INTO GIMP ON WINDOWS

If you downloaded them from somewhere like deviantart.com, then they likely came in a .zip file. First you will need to unzip this file. This can usually be done by simply right clicking on the .zip file and selecting "Extract All" or something similar depending on what operating system you are using.

After you've extracted the brushes from the zip file, you just need to move them to your GIMP brushes folder. For me, I'm running Windows Vista, and the folder I have to put them in is found at C:\Users\UserName\.gimp-2.6\brushes, but it may be different for you.

To find out exactly which folder you need to place your brushes in, start GIMP and go to Edit>Preferences. In the window that pops up, find "Folders" in the list on the left. Click the little "+" symbol next to it to expand this option, if it isn't already expanded. Then you should see "Brushes" listed below it. Click "Brushes" and then in the right side of the window you should see a list of the folder locations where GIMP will look for your brushes. You need to put your brushes in one of those folders for GIMP to be able to see them (actually you can put them in any folder you want, but then you have to tell GIMP where that folder is, so it knows where to look).

Welome to Comix Tuts