Line Art

Last week we continued working on the character design that we created the second week. Week five was all about line art, so after a very short introduction we were asked to do a cleanup of the drawing we created in the beginning of the course. I did find the introduction very brief and several of us were then left wondering how you create clean line art, feeling we were not shown any techniques on how to approach it.

That led to a lot of googling, trying to find good tutorials on how to do line art, which was surprisingly hard to find, mostly I found a wide spectrum of different tips. I then tried several of them and after two days of trial and error I found a way that worked for me, of course I still need a lot of practice but I am happy with the lines I was able to produce, given the short amount of guidance.

Here is the before...


and here is the final image...

As usual i will add the reflective assignment for you aswell.

I did at first experiment a bit with light but it did not feel like the right approach, instead I wanted to stay focused on the volume that I had tried to create when drawing the first one. Therefore I chose to use lines to show volume and depth by emphasizing important curves. I also used line thickness to show different materials in her clothing and accessories and they lead the attention to where the action is in the mouth area. I wanted her to convey strength and femininity and therefore I kept the lines thin and sharp but curvy and flowing avoiding straight lines. In the hair and clothing I have deliberately left some lines broken as it gives life to them instead of them looking stiff. I also emphasized the eyes and face as it is the most important part and her eyes reveal her personality as a hunter.

My biggest problem was getting the lines to being where and how I wanted them to be, also I felt it was not explained clearly to us how to do this task but that we were expected to find a way that works for us. After day or two of trial and error I finally found a way that worked for me, using a small, hard brush and drawing fast semi-long lines and pressing ctrl+z until it was where I wanted. Since all the construction was already made what remained was the tedious and deceptively difficult task of creating clean lines and the challenge of not loosing the feel of the original drawing and expression in the face.