Clean line art

This is a question I ask myself everyday 'how can I make my jaggie, boxie, pixelated lines look like good clean line art drawings?' The answer varies, especially if you Google or Youtube that question. Which leaves me to beileve that there is not just one correct answer but hundreds of different methods that most artists use when cleaning up line work. Line art is what you call a drawing that has yet to be colored. (An inked or pencil drawing) When you scan your line art your image can look very blocky and your lines often times look very jaggie and pixelated. To clean those jaggie lines you can do a few things 1.) you can start inking all of your drawings using a wacom tablet from now on or 2.) You can use a paint editing program like Photoshop or Gimp to help fight the war on jaggies. In this tutorial I'm going to use the Gimp because I like free things, and it is what I use for all my digital editing needs.

Step 1: After you have scanned your line art image.

So you've scanned your image at 300 dpi resolution and saved you drawing as a gif or jpeg grayscale photo file.
*Note if you saved you image as a jpg you will also need to set you jpg res to %100*
Now your ready to get to work open your photo editing program of choice, in this case the Gimp, and open the file you have just scanned. This tips are very basic and can be done on any advanced photo editing program.

In the Gimp, go to: image>mode>grayscale.

Step 2: Straightening out the lines

Then go to: filters>blur>gaussian blur (IIR) in the Gaussian blur menu adjust to the piont where your jaggie lines look more sraight and natural. In my example I set the blur radius to 2.0
don't worry if your image looks too blurry for now.

Step 3: Darkening and Whitening your image

Next, I want my blurry lines to look dark and I want my white back ground to stay white to do this I would need to adjust the levels, so go to: tools>color tools>levels. In the levels input menu set the black level to 150 and the white level to 200.

And we are done. Now this drawing is ready to be colored! This is just one of many ways to clean your line art drawing I know of another way that is a little more advanced it is the one I use to this very day perhaps in a later blog post I will share it with you. If you have your own personal way of cleaning line art please share it I am always looking for new ways to keep my lines looking clean. Later I will show you how to color a line art image.
INSPIRED!
--Von

Pencils to Pens...

I don't know if you all realise this... but if you are an artist you know that you are special. (At least that's what my mom tells me.) they make art pencils and pens made specially for us. Sure, we can use regular pencils and pens but where's the prestige in that!? I want to share with you some of the art supplies I use when I am ready to create magic. Starting with Staedtler mars lumograph art pencils. You can find them in mostly any art store. You could buy them individually or in a pack. Pencils range from H, HB and B. H pencils are very light they are good for penciling out a light sketch of your ideas or if you just want to do some light shading and toning. HB is like your average HB pencil, I use it to flesh out my lines and bring my sketches to life. B pencils are bold and dark I use B pencils to darken lines blacken areas that need to be blackened and add a bold outline. As good as Staedtler pencils are they do tend to smudge a lot. I usually use staedtlers for sketches in my sketch book these days and not so much for panel work. For even thinner lines I like to use lead pencils for adding detail. Any lead pencil will do although, I fined that 0.5 lead pencils use finer lead oppose to the 0.7 lead pencils.

For panel work I use a black Venus col-erase pencil. It typically is a black pencil crayon with an eraser at the end of it. These pencils draw smooth lines and come in a variety of colors. To tell you the truth I don't have any real reason for using these pencils for my panels but hey, they don't smudge. No smudges equal good clean lines.

From pencils to pens, and for pens I look to staedtler once again. Staedtler pigment liner's that is. They vary from fine point tips to broader thinker tips just like the art pencils do. They range from 0.01 to 07. I really like the Staedtler mars graphic 3000 duo markers as well. It's a marker that acts like a paint brush its amazing. But Staedtler is not the only graphic pens on the market there are also Sakura pigma microns which I fined are just as good.

Now I'm not saying the pens and pencils I use are the best on the market, I just want to help new artists get a sense of what is out there. INSPIRED!
--Von