[gowansy]

Does anyone have any good brush pallette's uploaded avaliable for download, that give nice clean lines, for comic style drawings? If so please give me the link to download them, thanks

[Blind]

I'm assuming you mean for Photoshop? Couldn't you just use a default round brush?

[gowansy]

Sorry about that lol... I'm in erm, a sorta coma, when i posted i only just woke up.

Yes i did mean Photoshop, and theres one thing bugging me, i see people post art on here and they have extremely clean, straight nice clear lines... When i try to use the hard round brush, i get shaky shitty lines that dont like nice, however when i do a fast stroke... They are nice and clean, if say i'm tracing a drawing i scanned, it looks horrible.

[derm]

If you really have a hardon for comic/cartoon style smoothness in your line art, you might wanna look into trying out Illustrator or another vector art package.

If you want to avoid that, just ignore me. No feelings will be hurt.

[faB]

Some methods:

- you can work the traditional way with brush & inking, requires some experience to have nice clean lines, I have never tried, you can use a brush or some micron pens

- I have seen a very good drawing once which was done with pencil, the guy said he just had very clean pencil lines, he then just tweaked the 'levels' in photoshop to turn them to sharp black lines.

- using Illustrator, from my meager experience the best and easiest way to produce the lines was to draw freehand with the brush tool, using a graphics tablet. You can then 'expand' the strokes and tweak the shape of the lines.. that's much easier than creating every line with the Pen tool! Of course you need a pressure sensitive tablet for this. You'll still need to tweak lines for best effect because it's hard to get very smooth lines.. yup.. even on my a4 wacom I m afraid.
When you use this method make sure to tweak the settings of the Brush pen, fidelity and smoothness, use a high fidelity for short lines with more angles, use a low fidelity for long curve lines to get smoother lines... use the Pencil smooth tool first .. THEN at the last resort expand your strokes for final tweaking.

[gowansy]

Thanks guys! Will do that FaB, and i've just gotten Illustrator 10 woohoo! Cheers for the explaination much appreciated mate

[oDD]

some people use flash to make outlines because it's easy to tweak them there (i think it's simmilar to ilustartor)

[Steelwind]

Flash also does vector graphics. Mmmm, vectors.

Director does too, I think. I think.

Steelwind

[hans_e]

Director doesnt handle vector stuff to well. Its like going back and working (with Raster) in MSPaint when your touching up a photo. There is a vector program within, but its kind of ugly to work with on more complex things. Plus, in Director you cannot import a raw vector file say from freehand (or any other). The solution can be a bit tedious but you can work with flash and export the work as a flash movie; thus, importing it into Director as a movie. BLEGH!

Anyhow... Flash, Freehand, and Illustrator are great are great for what you are wanting to do. Props, and good luck with the project!!

[hans_e]

on a side note....

Illustrator is has an awesome feature for you web guys. You can export vector files in an SVG (scalable vector graphics) format. I personally believe that it will eventually take over the market that Flash has a firm grasp on. Its basically what happens when you add pure vectors and throw in javascript. The possibilities are endless....

[Ian Jones]

If you scan in your linework, you can for example do the following to sort of iron out the squigglies a bit. Basically the technique involves blurring your lineart, once blurred all the small kinks and inconsistencies are ironed out (and some of the thin lines, so be careful!). You then need to bring that blurred image back up to crisp lines so you can do it by adjusting levels, or by adjusting contrast. You can only do this if the linework is integrated with white (eg. the white hasn't been erased to be transparent). Once you have done that you should have clean crisp lines. The more you blur, the more detail and errors get knocked out. This is much the same technique that ppl show in tutorials all over the net. I have seen the technique used for creating smooth interface shapes, to fix up an 'aliased' object etc...

Here I have some other suggestions I typed up one day. Copy pasted of course... so they don't totally relate to your problem.

Straight Lines:
To draw perfectly straight lines with any of the brush tools, simply make a mark at your starting point, then hold down shift and make the end mark of the line. Photoshop will draw a straight line between these points with whichever brush you have selected. To continue drawing more connecting straight lines just press shift again.

Accurate shapes:
To draw a shape with straight lines and sharp corners, like a triangle for example, just make a selection with the Polygonal Lasso tool, set to point by point mode. Then paint in the selection. Other shapes with curves can be done using the pen tool. Draw your shape with the pen tool. You can move the bezier handles around to create a smooth curve if you like. Goto the Paths pallete when you have your shape. Hold down ctrl, and left click on the path in the paths pallete. This will load a selection of that path shape, which you can use to paint within or you can add a stroke to use it for creating an outline.

Hope that helps.

[hans_e]

ok, I'm going to type this slow.....

Sorry about all the horrible grammar and words added to sentences. I'm sooo doped up on coffee right now its hard to keep extra words out of posts. Anyhow, don't judge all Indianans as morons because of me.

[Tom Luth]

Personally, I still prefer real ink on paper, but I do a fair amount of full digital for my comic work. (Pencils on paper, then scanned, but digital inks.) In Photoshop, I initially used the Pencil tool, as inks need to be hard-edge NON anti-aliased, as the half-toning of the anti-aliased edges look bad. However, I found I could not get the look I wanted using a pencil, and decided to try a hard-edged brush. The brush is anti-aliased, but when done, I will use levels to blow out the grays, giving me the hard edge I require, and looking better than I could get with the pencil.

In Painter, I have achieved similar results with variations of the scratchboard tool, also adjusted later with levels.

Recently, I have been playing with Illustrator for inking, being given a number of tips from Jeff Zugale, who has been using this technique for some time on his strip "Mystic for Hire." [http://PaganCity.com/] He simplifys the art when finished, for import to Flash (tends to reduce size from 3MB down to less than 100k). Basically, we are talking about the calligraphic brush with pressure sensitivity, such as a 5pt brush, with pressure at 4pt. Play with the different pressure settings for the Wacom to get the right feel.