Creating art directly in Illustrator is great - you can mess with each single line and change colors and even components on the go. However creating something from scratch is rather tedious and time-consuming - even if you're pretty good with a stylus it still is faster to draw something by hand with a pencil (at least in my case anyway). This of course doesn't apply to say abstract-ish sort of art like the three I posted before. I'm talking about drawing pretty detailed characters and objects.
I got a book called "how to draw your own graphic novel" (which is great by the way; has good advice and nice practice exercises). I went ahead and drew the very first character from there - a barbarian. Once it was done I used a 0.05 Black ink pen to outline it, erased all the pencil and was done with it. I wanted to color it in Illustrator so it was time to test out the Image trace feature. I took a photo with a DSLR camera, tuned it in photoshop a bit, and placed the file and tried different tracing modes. It wasn't the best result - I kept losing either the very top lines or the very bottom ones because of the way camera focused. I tried using a tripod and went back and forth with it. Then I started just rebuilding the whole image with curves and lines using the photo as a guidline. It worked but the process was very slow and tedious. And well it wasn't what I wanted.
Then I figured I'd go get a cheap scanner and see if that will make my life easier. I got a $50 Canon scanner (2400x4800dpi). Scanned the image (in grayscale or black and white), upped the contrast and placed it in AI.
Now, please remember, that this is a picture from "how to draw your own graphic novel" book - not my own creation - so don't use it anywhere or for anything :)
Another way of doing this is building the art point by point and using the sketch as a guide. This method is described in Part 2 of this tutorial.
I got a book called "how to draw your own graphic novel" (which is great by the way; has good advice and nice practice exercises). I went ahead and drew the very first character from there - a barbarian. Once it was done I used a 0.05 Black ink pen to outline it, erased all the pencil and was done with it. I wanted to color it in Illustrator so it was time to test out the Image trace feature. I took a photo with a DSLR camera, tuned it in photoshop a bit, and placed the file and tried different tracing modes. It wasn't the best result - I kept losing either the very top lines or the very bottom ones because of the way camera focused. I tried using a tripod and went back and forth with it. Then I started just rebuilding the whole image with curves and lines using the photo as a guidline. It worked but the process was very slow and tedious. And well it wasn't what I wanted.
Then I figured I'd go get a cheap scanner and see if that will make my life easier. I got a $50 Canon scanner (2400x4800dpi). Scanned the image (in grayscale or black and white), upped the contrast and placed it in AI.
Inked sketch
Image trace worked like a charm - I used the "Sketched Art" option. The black outline was a compound path and all the pieces had no fill but where there so I didn't even have to use a brush to give it a fill - just selected each single piece or groups and colored it. Then I made a couple sub-layers to add shading and detail. After that was done I made a background layer and drew the ground, mountains, etc with a stylus - easy stuff.
Final result
Now, please remember, that this is a picture from "how to draw your own graphic novel" book - not my own creation - so don't use it anywhere or for anything :)
Another way of doing this is building the art point by point and using the sketch as a guide. This method is described in Part 2 of this tutorial.
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