Strokes Of Genius...

Part of this project was to learn some tasty rendering techniques (that's colouring in) and to get used to my graphics tablet so that I can get to a professional level by christmas...... easy. So I got started this week by watching a few tutorials online about various ways to use photoshop to ink pencil sketches to get ready for colouring. There are two main ones that I attempted to see which I prefer but first i needed a drawing to ink.

I quite like this sketch and think I might look pretty cool rendered so I shall experiment on this handsome chap. 

First I tried free hand tracing just by drawing directly on top of the sketch, it's pretty hard but it's quite quick and the lines have a sense of movement to them.

 

It does look quite nice but some of the lines are quite wobbly and because of my lack of experience I had to re-draw most of it until I got lines I could put up with, also I would like a lot more line thickness variation. This is all stuff that can be worked on though and it was quite fun, heres without the sketch in the background. 

For a first go this is pretty good, I think out of the two techniques this is my favourite but heres the other.

This is the pen tool method which uses vectors instead of bitmaps and the quality is immediately noticeable but as you can see in the layers section in the bottom right each line is a separate shape. This means that each line takes a while to construct and even this small amount of inking took nearly an hour. Also to be honest even though the lines look clean and have nice thickness variation there's not much character in them, plus i kinda feel like I'm cheating.

Mind you those lines are tasty............ no Joe, takes way too long. And I definitely want to get used to drawing lines free hand with my graphics tablet, It'll improve my work in other areas as well. This technique would be good for a simple character but mine would take hours.

I'll keep you updated with my progress.