Feedback on Digital Art Attempt

[EchoEternal]

Since I'm new to digital art and not entirely sure how to fix the issues with this picture, I thought I'd ask you guys.

 

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• I used regular #2 mechanical pencil to sketch, then inked the sketch with a thin-tip Sharpie and erased the lines.
  
• I scanned at the library in both B&W and grayscale mode to see which looked better.
  
• I used the B&W result because it looked cleaner.
  

I used my laptop's touchpad and PS2 to color and shade.

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• I used the magic wand tool and eraser to get clean lines & a transparent background.
  
• Then I created layers and pretty much used the line art as a coloring book, putting one or two colors in each layer.
  
• I stayed inside the lines by selecting sections in line art using the magic want tool and inverting selection/constricting/expanding as a necessary, then switching to the layer I was putting the current color in.
  
• I selected darker colors for the outline by selecting from the color the outline would border and then making it darker.
  
• I shaded by putting a new layer on top of every color layer, selecting the appropriate area as described before, and using a low opacity of the outline color to shade each section.
  
• I just used a low opacity blue with a large brush to paint in the simple bg.
  

This is supposed to be a pink Skieth holding a Drackonack.

 

TL;DR

traditional line art colored with PS2 using laptop touchpad. How do I make it and future pieces look better?

[~Shoot Em All Peophin!~]

I clean the lineart by using these methods using photoshop :

 

i) i choose white color as primary color. choose select and then color range.

ii) delete white selection.

iii) on the drawing layer, use outline. you will see the dirty section clearly.erase.

iv) after dirty section cleaned. undo outline selection.

[EchoEternal]

I clean the lineart by using these methods using photoshop :

 

i) i choose white color as primary color. choose select and then color range.

ii) delete white selection.

iii) on the drawing layer, use outline. you will see the dirty section clearly.erase.

iv) after dirty section cleaned. undo outline selection.

 

Thank you! This is exactly the kind of help I was looking for!

 

That sounds a lot easier than what I did. I'll definitely try this.

[Angeló]

Your vote has been cast for BloodSapphire

 

good luck ... i like your art :)

[linsta]

Lineart: Illustrator is a great tool for doing lineart if you can get the program and learn it. Although, if you're used to PS, it might be a bit of a challenge since it's a bit more difficult to learn if you learn PS first. I don't use illustrator myself (although I wish I did) but it might be easier if you don't have a tablet. Also, when I didn't have a tablet I used to use paint shop pro and use the line tool. It was super easy to use, but this was like 8 years ago and programs do change so no guarantees!

 

Also, a neat trick to making your colours more alive, is to use different colours to shade/highlight. I know this might sound strange at first, but try it out!

Shade on a new layer, and change the colour to see what effects you get. Try using complementary colours. I'm not a big fan of the red/green combo.. but you can get really cool effects. For example, shade a yellow colour with a bluish or purplish tone, not too saturated though, or you'll get crazy psychedelic art. Or shade blue with orange, etc.

 

Adding lighting gives nice effects too. Try it out with different colours. Just keep experimenting! Let me know if you need any examples =)

[EchoEternal]

Your vote has been cast for BloodSapphire

 

good luck ... i like your art :)

Thank you, Angelo!

 

Also, a neat trick to making your colours more alive, is to use different colours to shade/highlight. I know this might sound strange at first, but try it out!

Shade on a new layer, and change the colour to see what effects you get. Try using complementary colours.

I'll try this, thank you! =) I'm new to coloring with any medium, so I'll try to keep your tips in mind next time :graduated:

[Travisaurus]

One thing that I can suggest is for the shading, if you use a low opacity brush with a low flow, it will make the shading appear more gradual rather than rigid. That's the best that I can explain it. If you look at my Photoshop work on here you'll understand what I mean.

 

Aside from that, save a lot and experiment! Do some gradients for the background and if you're interested I can explain to you how to do a few finishing touches that give it a completely different look, depending on what you are looking for. Another thing you could do is practice some PS tutorials to learn various techniques, eventually they become second nature and they flow into your art work.

 

IMO: Looks great! I'm actually a little jealous of your lineart; I haven't inked any drawings in about 6 years. Keep at it! Stay persistent!

[EchoEternal]

One thing that I can suggest is for the shading, if you use a low opacity brush with a low flow, it will make the shading appear more gradual rather than rigid. That's the best that I can explain it. If you look at my Photoshop work on here you'll understand what I mean.

 

Aside from that, save a lot and experiment! Do some gradients for the background and if you're interested I can explain to you how to do a few finishing touches that give it a completely different look, depending on what you are looking for. Another thing you could do is practice some PS tutorials to learn various techniques, eventually they become second nature and they flow into your art work.

 

IMO: Looks great! I'm actually a little jealous of your lineart; I haven't inked any drawings in about 6 years. Keep at it! Stay persistent!

I did try to use a low opacity, but I guess it just wasn't low enough. I totally forgot to adjust the flow and didn't honestly know to do so! Thank you for telling me.

 

I was thinking of doing a gradient, but forgot how and figured it would look more "authentic" if I did it by hand.

 

It looks like you shade and highlight with colors not found in the object, like Linsta suggested. I've now tried that and I do kind of like the result.

 

Edit: Here is my second digital piece

Line art

Colored Lines

For Strangeitch

I tried shading and highlighting in complimentary colors, as suggested, and I do kind of like the results. I'm not too proud of my shading skills, though. I Think I should have used lower capacity and a more flow.

Feedback again? :whistle:

 

Edit2: I used thin tip sharpie for the line art on the dragon one, which is why the line art for it has more..."issues."

[Xepha]

If you are into video tutorials... Digital-Tutors.com offers many of their courses for free (sometimes it's not the entire topic that is free, but there will be enough to pick up for a beginner.) I was planning to watch some of them for Illustrator during my break, but I keep procrastinating :P.

[Wolf Child]

There are actually a couple of ways you can do lineart, and it really depends on how comfortable you are with your pen tablet.

First, keep in mind that the width of your lines can totally affect how your picture looks.

Thin and Thick lines. Thin lines will give it a more realistic look, while thicker lines make your picture appear more cartoon like. You also get a more 'realistic' look if you color your lineart to a slightly darker color than your base colors, changing the colors as the color bound by it changes. ((outline skin in a pinkish color that is slightly darker than the tone and darkening with shadows, lightening with highlights. Outlining the shirt the same color as the shirt, etc.))

 

Actually doing the lineart can be estremely simple or extremely complex. Don't feel like it all has to be on one layer while you're working on it - I actually get a lot better results by working on multiple layers and merging once I finish ((it allows me to mess up and not have to completely redraw/render the line :b. I can just erase the overlap and it's cool.))

First I really like the method Shoot'em mentioned, but another suggestion I have would be to actually multiply your lineart layer. ((if you look at your layer options, there's a dropdown menu that houses this feature.)) This will basically overlap the information so your lineart, particularly your pencil drawing, doesn't interfere with what you see under it. It blends, effectively, and this means you don't have to be so entirely neat with your pencil work. You also don't have to delete everything on that layer if you don't want to ((if you're using a high contrast BW scan you will usually get a really good effect here.))

If you don't like your sketch and want to make clean lines over the picture you've done, you can actually use the pen tool to flex vector lines over your picture and then stroke with a brush width of your choice to get just the right lines. If you want I can give you a super quick tutorial on how to make this work. Like illustrator you work with vector lines which are not as set in stone as raster strokes are and they can be bent and oriented however you want. Once you've got the line the way you want it, stroke and move to the next bit. If you want sharper tips to your edges all you have to do is erase along the line, just like sharpening a knife.

What I do personally is just draw with my tablet. There really isn't a right or wrong way to do this, it just takes practice, and be prepared to make errors and mistakes constantly. I also recommend working BIG. When you shrink the picture later to display size, your mistakes don't show up as much. x3

 

Probably the hardest part for me is painting in the lines, and there's actually an awesome cheat for this. On your lineart layer, use the magic tool/lasso tool to select as much of the inside of your picture as you can ((with a little bit of expanding selection and all that.)) Fill the base color layer ((not your BG)) under the lineart layer with grey. Spend a little time filling in all the little patches here and there. Then you can create a new layer, right click it, and hit 'create clipping mask.' This will attatch the layer to your base color layer and what happens is that no matter how wild and crazy you paint it will never go outside the area you've painted in grey. This keeps your work extremely tidy.

This method can also be used to paint your lines. Just make a mask over the lineart layer and paint away :3 no having to go back and redo/recolor anything.

 

I hope that helps, I used PS7 for the longest time and I'm not sure what features PS2 didn't have. D: If you'd like details on anything I mentioned let me know.

[linsta]

I'm going to add a bit to what SEAP and wolfchild said about cleaning lineart. I decided to make examples of each method because i'm avoiding a mountain of homework and assignments right now.

 

I figured I'd also make a short tutorial on how to do the channels method in case anyone else looks at this. I used to use the "select colours" method that SEAP uses or simply put the layer on multiply, but learning about the channels method really made things way easier and more flexible for me. I thought I should share it because it is GREAT for scanned lineart, and it's really quite simple. When I first learned it, I kept forgetting the first step since I had no clue what channels were, but it's definitely the best method I've found to clean lineart.

 

First, here are examples of each method.

 

 

Select Colour Range Method: Here is the method SEAP used to "select colour range". I'm sorry I only had sketches to use instead of actual lineart, so the messiness creates a ton of extra white areas. I'm sure this method works way better with clean lineart. Then again, you really need to have clean, inked lineart for this method to work well.

 

Multiply Method (easiest): Next, this is the multiply method. If you just want a single colour lineart, this is the easiest way, and I wouldn't bother with the next channels lineart. The thing I don't like about this method is that I prefer to colour my lineart, and you can't do that. You can always "colourize" by hitting control+U (I chose green-coloured lineart), but you cant really pick what colours go where. Again, if you are happy with that, this is the easy, one-step method to having clean lineart. If you want to experiment with colouring your lineart, use the channels method.

 

Channels Method (Most flexibility, "truly clean" lineart).

I like this because you can colour your lineart. If you are a lot more comfortable drawing on paper, you could even do your sketch and shade it with a pencil or pen, and you can even colour the shaded part once it's on the computer. If you want an example of this, just ask.

 

 

 

Here is the tutorial for how to achieve this:

 

 

 

 

I thought I'd include an example of the shading with different colours tip I included earlier. One thing is I never shade white with grey, I always use a greyish-blue. I never use any types of grays/whites/blacks to shade/highlight really =/.

 

 

 

 

The left picture is just shaded with the base colours. The right I used colours based more on the ambient lighting of the environment. I do a lot of dim lighting pictures. If you ever give that a shot, remember that in dim light, colours become less saturated and get closer to grey. Most of the colours I shaded with were towards the greyer side of the colour picker, but still enough colour to get that ambient effect.

 

 

Ok I should probably really do my homework now xD

 

Edit: Just a note, what the channels method actually does is it removes all the white from the layer, but it doesn't remove it by simply "deletion." Instead, it just makes the white areas transparent (there's a difference in this case). The more white.. the more transparent. So if you shade with an in-between tone, say 50% between black and white, it will end up being 50% transparent. So you can paint over it with any colour, but it will keep that same opacity... I hope that makes sense. It just makes your lineart act exactly as if it were drawn on a transparent layer on the computer, instead of on a piece of paper.