Cel-shading Tutorial

For those that may be interested, I've posted a basic tutorial of how I do my "cel-shaded" art.

Check it out here

already favd on dA

Say, that's pretty cool. And useful. Almost makes me build up the courage to color some of these pencil scribbles of mine...almost.

Ahh, it's interesting you use a mostly subtractive-method for rendering value; that is, cutting out areas you want brighter than adding shadows.

In regard to step 2, I inked with a mouse twice before I got a tablet and holy cow.. what a time consuming, mind-numbing experience. After that I went back to inking with a real pen and scanning the linework until I could afford a tablet.

I tried the route you use, of using the pen tool to get vectored lines, but really I've found the best solution is just to ink with a tablet. (I don't know if you have one.)

If you feel Photoshop's lines aren't crisp enough you can either use the sharpen filter (I suggest fading that effect by about 50%), the Sharpen tool (usually R shortcut on the keyboard), or inking at 2 to 3 the size that you want the image to be then shrinking down. (I know several artists who use the final technique effectively.)

I prefer Painter for inking, because I tend to get crisper, more expressive lines there than in Photoshop. Really, I think you deserve some kind of masochist badge for inking with a mouse.

I agree. I have a tablet, but I can't get enough control over line widths with it, so I end up back on the mouse.

Yes. I have a Intuos, but it's really more a matter of my hands not being very digital-friendly in that regard.

It works for the roughs, but when I want to clean up the lineart it just doesn't get the crisp result I'm looking for, even at high-res.

I suppose I could trying to go up to 4000px and then down to 2000px after the lineart.

I have the opposite problem. I can't stand having a tiny tablet. My arm wants to move much more than the tablet will allow and I can't properly translate the scale effectively. I'd be much happier with a 1 to 1 movement from the tablet to the screen. :<

I started with a 9x12" tablet which was very, very nice. But holy cow I had to make these gigantic arm movements to do anything. In college I used that tablet at my apartment and 4x5 graphires in the lab. The graphires were lower quality but the size comfort made up for that. 5yrs later I downsized and upgraded to an intuos3 6x8" and boy howdy what a comfort difference.

I never thought of doing stage 4 the way you did - that's kind of cool, man.

Yeah, I used to do the regular "draw darker tones" cel shading, but this lets me tweak things on the fly more.