0) Introduction

Shock of all horrors. I do not “make lineart” however I do make liberal use of lines in my work.

 

This tutorial is going to be covering how you can learn to think about your lines a little differently, as something more than a box to colour later. How you can add texture, or interest, to your work exactly when you need it, instead of anticipating ahead of time where you might want it.

 

Especially as far as comics and illustration goes, we all tend to follow the pattern

sketch > lines > colour.

 

(And I am not here to say this is a bad method, there are plenty of reasons why this is a tried and true method of working. )

 

However, especially within the digital medium, I am not hampered by the expense of colour printing, or non digital printing issues needing solid blacks to define the shapes clearer. And I am not doing the inking by hand to be later scanned in so I am not limited to certain ink colours.

 

So? Why am I doing the lineart first? I asked myself, a long time ago now. Turns out I had no answer other than “because that’s just how it’s done.”

 

So I wondered what would happen... if I switched the order.

sketch > colour > lines

 

The answer? Perfect Magic. At least for me.

1) Making Marks - Tutorial Starts Here

So! If we're not going to be using linework to actually define all the shapes and spaces where we have to colour in? what ARE we going to do with the lines?!

 

Well this starts with a thing I like to call "mark making" or how we use our tools to place the colour on the canvas.

 

If I can make a whole piece without lines ar all, just using shapes, then when I do choose to use lines, I want to do something actually useful, or fun with them!

(You're going to be seeing a lot of this brush, it is a basic edited pencil. Nothing fancy with just a bit of texture to the sides. My fav!)

 

Now this is just some basic lines and marks. I'm sure we've all seen hatching, cross hatching and stippling.

 

But the wonderful thing about digital art.. is that without incurring any extra expense of buying different size pens.. we are not limited by size.

Or even by texture! Even in out of the box Clip Studio comes with more brushes than you can shake a stick at.

 

So what if we did these same lines, in an airbrush? a Hard round brush? Or even an oil paint brush?

Note how even with the painterly brushes I am still making "lines" I am not blending together the colours and painting.

 

We are not limited, when doing linework, just to brushes we feel are "for lines".

 

But of course straight lines and cross hatching aren't particularly interesting... however useful they may be. This is where it gets fun.

 

You can take each of your brushes, and have an experiment with the full range of marks you can make.

 

This of course is personal to you, my marks tend to be quite messy and gestural, but you may prefer something more regimented and technical. You could even use the line and shape tools!

You can even change the size as you go, or erase parts of the lines you just drew, or add a second or third colour. The sky is the limit!

 

I suggest you go forth and have a go yourself. Draw without any specific picture in mind.

Or you could experiment with different marks you could use to describe hair, or clothing, or brick, or grass...

 

There are no rules! Do what feels best to you!

2) Here Comes The Colour!

After promising you "this tutorial isn't about black and white lineart" I think it's about time I did something with more than the black and white shapes right?

The "traditional" way to do coloured lineart, is to start with your black and white line piece, layer your flat colours underneath, and then colour in your linework to match.

 

(As previously stated there is nothing at all wrong with this method, I am just providing an alternative!)

However I personally find this difficult. When crafting the black and white lineart, I'm looking at it as pure black and white, balancing out the composition with just black and white tones. Then when I colour it this balance changes again, then colour the lines the balance changes for a 3rd time, and I used to find that I had made a nice strong linepiece, and just murdered it with colour.

 

Pretty sad when I like colour so much.

 

This doesn't even take into account all that lovely mark making I did earlier. I want to make sure I use the marks to their full potential, not just guessing where they might look good when I put colour on it. And quite often I find there are places where I don't need a line at all because the edges of the coloured shape provide the "line" I need.

 

There are no lines to separate shapes in reality after all!

As you can see here, I took 5 tones from white to black, and layered some basic linework over each one, in each of the colours.

 

The balance of each is different against the background. While some artists can anticipate in advance how their eventual colourised linework will balance out... It's just easier and more useful to do it as I go along.

The next thing we can start to do on our mark making journey, is to try colour!

If you feel this is a big step you can start just with grey tones too.

 

Pick a dark background, and start to lay down shapes and colour and see what you can build! Try different thicknesses of brush, and see how it reacts. A fine brush will look much more delicate on a dark background than a thick one, you can layer up marks of different colour to create a texture (again note we are not blending, just using solid marks!)

Perhaps try different coloured backgrounds, and recolouring your marks to suit the new background!

 

You can isolate one of the marks you like, and try it with different tones and colours against the background to see what looks good and what doesn't.

I particularly enjoyed this delicate pale coloured swirl, but notice how lovely and elegant it looks when it's pale coloured, but the darker I make it the more it looks like a dirty mess!

 

You can learn a lot about what kinds of colour combos work, what kind of lines to use over pale grounding colours vs dark ones...

 

It's a lot of fun to just sit about and play!

 

But now let's up the mark game a little, and add some shapes!

just some basic geometric shapes and something a little funky i made with the select tool.

 

Now we can have a think about how we want to use line to enhance these shapes. we could simply outline them, but they stand quite strong against the background all by themself, so I don't think that's necessary (though as previously stated, there are no rules!)

 

We can perhaps consider turning them into 3D shapes using marks, or make them decorative, or add something inside them as if we are looking into a hole....

The shape is also as much of a guide as you want it to be! Draw outside it, draw inside it, ignore it completely, try different colours.

we can even up the ante by adding some different tonal patches to the shapes!

you may find once you reach this point something subtle is all you need! After all, the method in which I use lines is to ENHANCE the shapes that are already there, not create them.

We could really keep experimenting forever with colour, tone, combos of lines and shapes... but isn't that art?!

 

Feel free to experiment as long as you wish, whenever you wish! Through this experiment I have used the same altered "pencil" brush, but you could get creative, adding multiple line making tools to each shape etc.

 

But for now let's move on to putting some of this into practice!

3) Coloured Line Work Example

Starting with an example! Here is a lovely sketch of a witchy lady. It's october it seems apropriate!

Here's the flat tones of the piece. Note how each section is already defined, some areas of shade, but that each "part" the hair the clothes the lips etc already have defined outlines by value of being contrasting colours.

Aaaaaaand Linework!

Note how I use a combination of lighter and darker lines where apropriate. It's not one size fits all.

 

Some places such as under the chin benefitted from extra depth, but then under the nose was fine as it was.

 

These are not hard and fast rules, I add lines on a picture by picture basis.

4) Applying your shiny new skills!

Here's the sketch of another witch I drew. I've added areas of lace, and curly hair, a more structured corset and floofy sleeves, pleanty of variety to get our teeth into.

 

Feel free to use both the sketch and the flat colour piece to try out your own colouring! (Just credit me on social media if you do!)

You can create your flat colour shapes any way you like. Some folks use the round flat paintbrush to colour in the shapes, I like to use the polyline select tool.

See my other tutorial for more details on how to flat your piece, this tutorial is focusing on linework after all!

But anyway... back to flats!

Once I have my flats, i move the sketch to a new layer above the flats, and create a lineart layer above that, this way i can see both the sketch guide and what colours i'm working with.

Now I can start using all those techniques and marks I tried earlier to define my linework. But only where it's needed. For instance here I want to define the underside of the chin and the shape of the nose with skin tones, but there's no need for me to add a line to show where edge of the face goes into the hair because the colour change already does that for me.

After getting the "main" shapes drawn in I can hide the sketch layer and start building up the marks in whatever colour is right. Adding some pink lines on cheek and nose, pale white for highlights, drawing in the eyes and lips...

And if needed I can add more areas of flat colour shading to the flat layer (but i won't be covering how I did that in this tutorial).

Notice how I use the short strokes to describe things that are maybe more textured or rougher, and longer smoother strokes to define such as the nose.

Now I move on to the hair, when I'm working with curls I like to use lots of short curved lineworks to keep the 3D texture, instead of long swoopy wiggles which will just look like waves (apropriate if you're doing waved hair though!!)

 

When I want to make use of more gestural marks, but not go over my shapes, I can take a selection from my flat colour layer, and use it so I only draw inside that shape, so I don't have to truncate my movements in tight shapes like under the chin here.

In general across the picture the more texture the more marks, so hair, especially curls will need more lines than say areas of skin which may need onl a tiny mark or two to highlight something i can't do with my coloured shapes.

Also be sure to check out some reference for the kinds of textures you're trying to portray. Here's a photo of my own wild curly hair to show the kind of texture I want to capture with my lines. I'm not trying to replicate the realism just the texture. This is where you can really let loose and have fun, there's a reason I like drawing curly hair!

Now I've defined some shape and areas of darkness it looks great, but could do with a little bit of a pop, using short sharp flicks of my pen following the shape of the curl I can add some highlights to the roundness of the curls.

Once again, this isn't blending, or painting, i'm not smoothing the lines into one another or such I'm using the hard line shape to keep a stylised and interesting aproach to my drawing, instead of doing nice painting work.

 

In contrast to the hair, the fabric of the sleeves and skirt is much smoother, so i use long sweeping marks to illustrate their shape. The light on the gauzy sleeves is much more delicate than the shadows so I use a finer shape with the pale tone.

Continue on in this fashion, adding whatever marks of whatever colour is needed, go wild if you like! I find often that very fine lines for highlight are able to bring out some of the subtle grainlines of fabric texture, esp in a satiny fabric, that heavy dark lines wouldn't quite manage!

Finish the image with whatever further shading or colour wizardry you want (or leave it as it is for a more flat style!)

5) Further Examples

Here's a few further examples of how this technique works in my illustrations.