Clean Line Art! Digital Inking Tips

so how do you get clean smooth lines that are well inked in photoshop or any other digital drawing program a lot of people would just say practice more but that is just such a hand waving answer and that can be really frustrating as a beginner artist because practice more is something that they've been telling you your whole life and it doesn't really mean anything so today we're going to teach you how to practice more so you can get those real slick lines if you like bam animation and enjoy all the cool fun art learning that

we do here consider supporting us on patreon the link will be in the description below so uh welcome to bam it's the show where you guys send in the art and we redraw the art yeah as if it was like a real animated show that's right drawing on a tablet or a cintiq is inherently much different than drawing on paper the services of both are really slippery and digital drawing programs like photoshop are really sensitive to even the slightest hand wobble and if you are using a tablet you of course have to be looking directly

at your screen while your hand moves on its own down here which can make it quite hard for beginner artists to get the lines that they were looking for and that tends to accumulate into a volley of comments like what type of brush did you had to use for the liner do you draw smooth lines in photoshop what type of brush did you do to overcome these issues and achieve line eye prefection you must first develop precise hand skills and that takes dedicated practice let's develop those tactical hand skills with a few line training drills

this will be like boot camp for your hand you are building line confidence and confident lines are good here we go first make a new photoshop document 11 by 17 at 300 dpi then set your brush to be hot round and 15 pixels wide check on pressure sensitivity hand draw a line straight down the page and vary the pressure of your stroke so that it goes thick to thin then draw a line right next to it and invert the weight keep your lines straight and close together fill up the entire page you can do a

variation of this called an s curve this helps you practice making smooth turns to help you with precision practice quick circles that are about the size of a quarter and attempt to make the beginnings and end hook up so that the circle looks seamless [Music] now try circles that are weighted on one side make a dot and draw quick petal shapes around it intersecting all the looping strokes to that dot starting with a heavy stroke flick your hand down and lift off to create a tapering effect ideally you should complete two to three pages of

these making sure that you fill up the entire page you are building muscle memory line confidence and precision try to draw quickly and don't go back over your lines in an attempt to fix anything filling up pages like these a few times a week for a couple weeks is going to make a drastic improvement to your inking ability well excellent work maggots are you ready for some tips you can't start by making just a clean drawing clean drawings are the result of many layers of sketching most professional illustrators do several rough passes of any one

drawing tightening it down each time until their sketch is refined and clean enough inking a clean sketch is a lot easier than inking a loose messy one so take time to fully explore your sketch and rough out your drawing thoroughly instead of trying to make a drawing out of clean lines right away unless you're going for a rough edge a smooth confident line is made with a single swoop many new artists go over their completed lines multiple times because it makes them feel good or something this is called petting the line and it's going to

be really obvious that you've done this because your lines are going to have all these rough hairs and scratches all over them now of course that's fine for sketching but this makes your inked line look timid and amateur you can practice by doing contour studies a technique that works better on paper but this will help you correct old habits and build line confidence either way fix your eyes on the outline of a model or object then track the edge of the model with your eyes while simultaneously drawing the contour very very slowly in a steady

continuous line without lifting the pencil this is an exercise that you would actually do in art school brent this is great but let's use some of these techniques now to redraw some of the art that the fans sent us all these people sent their art to bam.redrawmir gmail.com so you guys go ahead and do that too so john sent this to us and i'm gonna try and make it into like a gravity falls character to clean up an ink something like this you'll want to have smooth bold outlines for your large shapes and quick thin

ones for your interior and these are good rules to follow for most inking styles these rules tend to work because in the real world there's really no such thing as lines lines are a graphical representation of value so in cartoons we use weighted lines to express value and form once you have foundational inking skills it will be easy for you to transition between inking styles [Music] it's important to practice proper photoshop technique and posture sitting at the desk facing forward place one hand on your tablet and then place the other hand above the buttons control

alt and z because the most important part of digital drawing is to smash these hot keys constantly that is the nature of digital drawing it takes most artists a few tries to get the line they were looking for do not do not feel ashamed of how many times that you're going to redo a line every professional artist in the industry is mashing those buttons eight hours a day you can't be very precise if you're trying to ink a drawing that's like two inches across zoom in and use your entire arm to get smooth strokes a

fast line is a confident line look at the difference that the speed makes you don't need to worry about ending your lines where they intersect trying to do this will make the ends of your lines look a little bit wobbly so feel free to go ahead and overshoot and erase the tail end if you do a precise job of erasing no one's gonna know mason sent this one to us and i wanted to turn it into a character from like a modern tv show like adventure time for most television animation styles the cleanup style has

pretty much little to no tapering and that's because very line weights are hard to reproduce consistently there are 24 different drawings in one second of animation and plenty of opportunities for mistakes so it's much easier to just have a single consistent untapered line throughout the entire production in photoshop if you want to turn tapering off completely just uncheck this box right here so a lot of artists think that their drawing tablet is the thing that's holding them back from making great art but it's not true with practice you can overcome this hand-eye disconnect a skilled

artist can make any type of art on any type of reasonably sized tablet it just takes longer on a tablet to get the line you were looking for but the end result is still the same for very difficult long lines that are hard to draw in a single pass you can use the photoshop pen tool click the pen and set it to a path click once to begin the path then click and drag your first major curve this will create a bezier handle on your path that defines the curve keep clicking and dragging until you

have mostly defined your line then you can switch to the white arrow tool to adjust the handle points until you like your path then switch to the brush tool b and press enter it'll stroke the path with your current brush and of course you can use texture brushes on this too hit delete and it will delete the path leaving only the raster line now this method has limitations in that it strokes your path um uniformly but that doesn't mean you can't go back and erase the ends and make your line taper photoshop cc 2018 now

has brush smoothing if you adjust the settings up here you can create a drawing mode that drags your brush on a string this is sort of like drawing with a pinstripe brush it will help you smooth out any tiny imperfections that your lines have and if you're not on 2018 you can of course use lazy nuzumi pro which costs 15 does the same thing and has a variety of other cool features as well ellipses radial lines rulers and honestly all kinds of good stuff that has helped me personally and it works with a ton of

programs but if you want to use the most recent form of photoshop you can subscribe to the creative cloud plan which is like 10 bucks a month so thanks to josh we got this awesome drawing i want to make it into sort of a stylized comic book look now for this one your inking work can be a little rough but the same line weight principles still apply it's just that you can be much more varied and expressive with the line and weight of your strokes you can even go back and erase over your lines just

to give them just a bit of texture no custom brushes were used to make this guys if you are actually serious about getting better at inking and cleaning up your lines go ahead and scroll down just a little bit because we included a link to download all the sketches from this episode it's like a little inking starter pack with instructions if you're serious about upping your line game then you can practice on that so go ahead and try your hand literally at that and send in uh what you make and bam is always looking for

new submissions so if you want your art featured in an episode send it to bam.redrawmyart gmail.com well we did it max we did it yeah we did it dude i didn't think this channel was going to get here a year ago or whatever me neither um so i would like to celebrate our hundred thousand subs by shouting out smaller youtubers yeah there's a lot of good artist channels out there that don't have a hundred thousand that we wanna call attention to yeah and we love our fans and we think that you guys would actually benefit

from seeing some of these awesome people i highly recommend andrea gerstman she has a lot of really informative videos about the breakdown of animation and how to hand draw it and how to do it all in flash and animate and it's super charming just to watch there's so many art channels on youtube that are like really boring to watch you know it's just a guy talking i don't like screen footage videos yeah and with bam we really tried to go above and beyond and we want to shout out other people who are trying just as

hard who don't have the same recognition that we might have yeah so definitely check out our friends guys and just thank you again for smashing that subscribe button and please continue to do so and just one more thing we don't post that often we're sorry but go ahead and smash that bell icon because when we post you're gonna want to know yeah thank you [Music] you