City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Juteboxhero's Jessie Star - WIP and Tutorial

Dandy1

By Dandy1,
Posted on: 2007-09-16 11:07 in Multi-Media Fan Creations

 

Posted

http://grumpygoat.deviantart.com/art...-Inks-65051534

I figure I'd post this, I've had a couple questions about how I ink in Illustrator. This is the same procedure I've used from Illustrator 8 up to CS3. Setup's fast. Get your sketch in, double click the layer and set it to TEMPLATE. Hit Ok. Lock the layer, and add a new layer for inks. Ready to ink? Let's go!

1. The brush I use is set to such: angle -120, roundness 60%, pressure 1pt (sometimes I vary the pressure to 2pts and set roundness to 70%...) Then I go to the bottom two boxes for color and stroke, one with white and one with black. Under should be a few lil option boxes. One will read NONE and have a red line through it. Click that. This means you've got a brush that wont fill up with the fill color. Woo!

2. I normally make one pass at one line, and then if it doesn't work, I'll either take the brush tool right over it or delete it using DEL and start over. Some lines can be finicky, and don't panic if a pointed edge becomes rounded, that's just how Illustrator works. You simply need to go over JUST that section of your line and draw a harder edge and it should correct the line.

3. Hey! I drew a line and tried to draw another line close to it and my first line disappeared! Yeah, Illustrator does that. This is why I take on a watercolor approach to inking. This means, I draw a line, then I find another section away from that line to ink, and then I can go BACK to the first area.

4. It's done! Now what? Okay, here comes the fun part. All those lines are separate lines. And you want it to be one picture that you can move around and export as a line drawing! So you're going to select the black arrow in the left/top corner of your toolbox. Hold the left mouse button down and drag a box (you'll see the lines) over the ENTIRE area you've inked. All the lines should light up with whatever base color is used for inking (that red or blue line that appears WITH the black ink). Right click once with your mouse. A dialogue box for the image should come up. Within that box is GROUP. Click that. Now, all your lovely lines are ONE unit! HOORAY!

5. This step's real simple. Delete the sketch layer out of there! You don't want that EVIL sketch showing up for your next step.

6. Exporting! I use my inked piece and color it in photoshop. So to do that, with your newly GROUPED inks, you're going to go to FILE-->Export. Choose your file name appropriately and SAVE AS a PSD. It will ask you a million things in that dialogue box. Your biggest concern will be DPI. I tend to save at either 300 or 600 dpi (most magazines are printed at 150 dpi so twice that is more than enough for a color print). Hit okay. Done!

Now you can take your linework and open it up in Photoshop. Go ahead and color away!

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
2. Some lines can be finicky, and don't panic if a pointed edge becomes rounded, that's just how Illustrator works.

[/ QUOTE ]
You can also edit the smoothing fidelity of the brush by double clicking the paintbrush tool and sliding it down to 1 or 2 instead of 4 or 5.

[ QUOTE ]
3. Hey! I drew a line and tried to draw another line close to it and my first line disappeared! Yeah, Illustrator does that. This is why I take on a watercolor approach to inking. This means, I draw a line, then I find another section away from that line to ink, and then I can go BACK to the first area.

[/ QUOTE ]
I don't find this easy or intuitive, since I have always worked the same area before moving on. So another option: I double-click on the paint tool and turn off "edit selected line" sometimes.

 

Posted

Nice brush, almost like a fine line marker...

My wife taught me this trick last July and it's made the world of difference. If you double click the brush or pencil tool, and uncheck the "keep selected" brush, you won't get the constant line disappearing thing... the "edit selected line" thing, I'm not sure what it does, but I keep it selected and it doesn't seem to matter.

LJ

 

Posted

Excellent Tute, Sayterra. I've just recently begun working with Illustrator, so after reading this, I ran like a madman to go mess with my brush settings and see what I thought. I gotta say, this is a pretty effective way to lay down those lines.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
2. Some lines can be finicky, and don't panic if a pointed edge becomes rounded, that's just how Illustrator works.

[/ QUOTE ]
You can also edit the smoothing fidelity of the brush by double clicking the paintbrush tool and sliding it down to 1 or 2 instead of 4 or 5.

[ QUOTE ]
3. Hey! I drew a line and tried to draw another line close to it and my first line disappeared! Yeah, Illustrator does that. This is why I take on a watercolor approach to inking. This means, I draw a line, then I find another section away from that line to ink, and then I can go BACK to the first area.

[/ QUOTE ]
I don't find this easy or intuitive, since I have always worked the same area before moving on. So another option: I double-click on the paint tool and turn off "edit selected line" sometimes.

[/ QUOTE ]

All the above works to. I just don't like turning off edit selected line because I normally DO get the line I want, I just tweak it later. Nira is also an excellent artist who should REALLY post her work...

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Nice brush, almost like a fine line marker...

My wife taught me this trick last July and it's made the world of difference. If you double click the brush or pencil tool, and uncheck the "keep selected" brush, you won't get the constant line disappearing thing... the "edit selected line" thing, I'm not sure what it does, but I keep it selected and it doesn't seem to matter.

LJ

[/ QUOTE ]

Duh I meant uncheck the "Keep Selected" box, not brush, box!

If that's checked AND the "Edit Selected Lines" box is checked, then any lines you put down will stay highlighted with the nodes showing.

Or the line you just placed will disappear if another new line is placed too close to it...

LJ

 

Posted

D'aww, thanks Say. Though I often use CoH characters for muses, it's more fantasy than CoH specific though.

 

Posted

So a slight update. I sit there and do color studies... here's the palette thus far. It's pretty saturated, but I used to be so afraid of saturation, I try to oversaturate and exaggerate before I pull the colors back in the final stages.

http://grumpygoat.deviantart.com/art...-Test-65405375