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[necromian]

Done
Before-

After-

[Akhel]

I predict this game will be full of win!

Anyway, I'm no artist, but I hear Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape being mentioned very often.

[Sar]

Anyway, I'm no artist, but I hear Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape being mentioned very often.

Illustrator and Inkscape are both vector software, so they're very good at getting crisp cel-shaded-style art, smooth gradients, neat lines and so on, and... not so good at much else. But if that's what you want, then they're both fairly popular vector art packages. Illustrator is far more capable than Inkscape, but also far less totally-free.

On the other hand, if you want to take a 'painting' approach, then you'll probably want a raster package instead of a vector package. The simple difference is that vector software deals in geometry, it stores the image as a set of curves and lines and fills, so it can be scaled to any size and it's nice and crisp but you can't really scribble and paint and blend with it, you edit by dragging nodes; raster software deals in pixels, it's easy to blend and push them around and erase and whatever, but if you scale it up too far then it just looks like a collection of coloured squares. On the other hand, you pretty much need a tablet to use raster art programs well, but vector art can be competently edited with a mouse.

Popular raster programs include Photoshop, OpenCanvas and Painter: Photoshop is the all-singing-all-dancing-costs-the-earth option (although Photoshop Elements is relatively cheap and pretty OK); OpenCanvas is designed specifically for creating digital art (it's my personal favourite) and it's nice and cheap, but it has some odd interface quirks; Painter is designed to behave like natural media so it can be a bit frustrating for a digital artist at times.

The only free raster-art program I can think of offhand is Paint.NET, which also requires you to have the .NET framework installed... it's pretty capable, but again it has some interface quirks.




If I were drawing over and colouring the same art I'd use OpenCanvas for the whole thing; pen tool for lines, acrylic brush for blocking colour, watercolour brush for blending. I'd maybe consider Painter, depending on what kind of look I wanted. But then, personally I don't really get on with Photoshop, and I know a lot of people who turn out pretty wonderful stuff in it, so it's worth investigating if you get the opportunity.

[necromian]

Thanks!
I'm trying to go for vector art, so I'll check out illustrator and open canvas.

I tried using the pen tool on open canvas, but failed horribly. Any suggestions?

[BenH]

Open Canvas' tools are really best suited for if you have a graphics tablet. If you don't have one, then using the vector tools in something like Illustrator will probably be your best bet.

[Bree]

Awesome-looking illustration, but if I might ask, exactly what is your game going to be about, sir Necromian?

[FARTRON]

The simple difference is that vector software deals in geometry, it stores the image as a set of curves and lines and fills, so it can be scaled to any size and it's nice and crisp but you can't really scribble and paint and blend with it

I'd recommend checking out Expressions. It's under MS production now though was originally an independent product.  The old, free version is still available and is a fairly impressive combination of vector art in a painterly environment.

[___]

Photoshop seems to work fine if you work at a high enough res.  When inking and coloring, resize them image to 200%, then when you're done and you want to use said image then scale it down by 50%.  Any wobbles in the lines and slight imperfections are wiped out

[Shambrook]

You could always go old school and just ink it by hand.

[___]

You could always go old school and just ink it by hand.

But I heard theres no ctrl+z in RL.

[Hideous]

No CTRL+ and CTRL+V either

[Inane]

I don't even use ctrl+ anyway. :D

[Lazer]

Photoshop seems to work fine if you work at a high enough res.  When inking and coloring, resize them image to 200%, then when you're done and you want to use said image then scale it down by 50%.  Any wobbles in the lines and slight imperfections are wiped out

you can do very limited vector stuff with the pen tool in photochops anyways.

the best way by far to outline anything is to go buy yourself a tablet and learns you some steady hands though. vector outlines just always look chunky and unnatural in my opinion.

[Corpus]

But I heard theres no ctrl+z in RL.

Yeah, but that encourages you to put effort into developing your skillz to the point where the lack of ctrl+Z is not an issue.

Fashion yourself a lightbox, for example, and that way you can outline without risking damaging your original sketch.

Still, there's nothing wrong with potatochopping it.

[Sar]

Yeah, but that encourages you to put effort into developing your skillz to the point where the lack of ctrl+Z is not an issue.

Personally, I find it very useful that there's no undo on my pen for developing my sketching skills - I deliberately sketch in ballpoint so I can't even use an eraser, half the time... but I still like the safety net of working digitally when doing finals; I may be able to get my line-work 'pretty good' first time, but with a couple of retries I may be able to elevate that 'pretty good' to 'very good'. ;-)

[gustav]

You could always go old school and just ink it by hand.

But I heard theres no ctrl+z in RL.

It's sad but the last time i sketched something on paper, i was instinctively looking for ctrl+z every time i did something wrong 

[Shambrook]

[Sar]

Unfortunately that stuff is lousy for drawing over.

[Bree]

Do what I do: Draw it all in non-photo blue pencil, then ink it. Then, when you scan it, do it in black and white- the pencil won't show up, only the ink. Then you can do any last minute tweaking in Photoshoop or whatever.

[Shambrook]

Unfortunately that stuff is lousy for drawing over.

Drawing over yes, inking over I've never had any problems, then playing around with the levels in photoshop makes it dissapear.

Of course I'm being massivley hypocritical I have one of these and haven't touched traditional media since.