Sometimes writing these out makes me feel like im saying the same thing over and over. I suppose I am really, as each month is basically the same subject of struggle again and again. I guess learning art is a bit like that in generally really. Determine your goal and bash your head against the wall until a piece of it comes off. Sooner or later the wall will come down. Of course, that’s not the only wall, heh.

For February, I mostly worked on character sheets, and struggled with the concept of “inking”. Because of my struggles with “inking” and the work I put into character sheet creation, I didn’t do much sketch work until near the end of the month. But, after learning a bit more of the nuance to “inking” I’ve discovered / decided that the concept of inking just does not matter in digital art. Inking is more of a traditional art thing, finalizing the rough pencil sketch lines for comics and physical media. Inking in the digital sense is not actually all that important, because most of the time you are working in an enviroment that allows changes very easily, without harming the end product almost at all.

The first instance of my unease with “inking” was with the character sheet of Rosemary Chambers. I decided to try out an “inking” brush to finalize the sketch lines, and to say to myself in an official sense that “this character now has completed lineart”. In the end though, it looked too rigid, pixelated, and made the overall sheet a bit wonky in a few places and was harsh to look at. After Rosemary, I made up a new character named Nilian Solus, and I wanted to try messing with the character sheet format a bit by having an extra clothing option and the base character design all on one page. More importantly, I wanted to try using a bit of a softer “inking” brush, and see how that would end up. The experience was much nicer, in that it felt a bit easier to use, and the overall look and feel of the sheet was much better than Rosemary’s. But, it still had a bit of pixelation and wonkyness in a few spots. Things like her eyes are messy to work with, especially if I didnt give her the right looking lines. The “inking” brush I used was actually just a more solid variation of the sketch brush I had made for myself a while ago. I liked the grainy texture it makes as I draw with it, makes everything soft and easy to work with. In my mind however, I kept thinking “Inking is all about hard, ‘official-this-character-has-been-inked’”, a sort of concrete and stiff thought to the whole thing. I decided to throw all of that out the window when a few friends and I decided to hunt down some art that had what we would call “inked lineart.”

Nothing we found had any instance of a clean and smooth lineart. Nearly everything was rough, colored over or covered up by shades and base colors. In many cases it was literally the sketched out lineart that made it to the final product. If you were able to remove all the color of the artwork with only the lineart left behind, it would be extremely easy to say “yeah, those are just sketch lines.” So, with that in mind, and I felt like it was time to put all of my experience with character sheets to use, and I decided (with someone else persuading me too, heh) to update Kalta’s character sheet. I used one brush for the entire process of sketching out her proportions and pose, placement and clothing, and then used the same brush to finalize her sketches. The brush used was the sketch brush, with a soft and grainy texture, that I had spent a good amount of time trying to get the pressure sensitivity right, but also gave it a narrow min/max size so it can be used in smaller spaces. There was also a bit of advice I wanted to try out, specifically directed to digital “inking” which was “always make sure to recolor the lineart to match the piece itself” or something similar to that effect. Recoloring obejcts in digital media is actually quite simple really. Lock the alpha layer, gab a brush and different color and woosh, the lineart is now a different color other than black. Black lineart is very harsh to look at and in general it’s much better to get the piece you’re working on to flow smoothly within itself, in a color sense.

So yeah, digital inking suuuucks. Better to be loose with it!

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