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Lineart Secrets For Beginners:
Hi everyone! Yaine here. Today we’ll see 5 lineart secrets that beginners don’t know. These will help you make amazing lineart without much effort!
Let’s go!
Lineart secret 1: Extremely long lines can make your art look ugly
You probably know chicken scratching is not ideal (when you make lines way too short and it looks hairy).
The problem with chicken scratching is that it shows your lack of confidence and the fact that you don’t know where you want to end the line. You’re uncertain, and that can be perceived by the audience… yikes.
Notice the lines that are too scratchy in this drawing:
So the solution is to make lines as long as possible, right? Wrong!
Extremely long lines can also make your drawings look ugly. When you make very long lines like these, it can kill the life in your drawing:
It’s the reason why many times we think, “the sketch was better than the lineart!”. Because we made lines with movement and energy in the sketch, but killed it with long lines in the lineart phase:
So what should you do? Well, first of all, you don’t need to always make extremely long lines. You just need to master connecting them.
Find a middle ground: be confident enough to make longer lines, but don’t make them so long that they lose their energy.
Start a new line whenever there’s a change in angle and make sure they connect well.
Lineart secret 2: warming up can improve dramatically how good your lines look.
When your arms and hands are cold, it can be harder to make smooth movements, so make sure to warm up before starting a drawing session.
It can be regular warmups, like for the gym (making circles with your arms open, rotating your shoulders, wrists and elbows, etc) or you can also practice some random lines, circles and waves before starting each drawing session.
This sort of practice is great for your hand-eye coordination and will also help you feel more confident in what you’re doing.
Lineart secret 3: you need to know beforehand where you want the line to go
When you can see in your mind what you want to place on paper, your lines will be more confident and bold.
If you start a line and you don’t know where do you want to go with it…. the result will suck. It’s like calling a restaurant to ask for food delivery and not knowing what you’ll ask. That’ll be… awkward, to say the least.
But when you know what you want, it’ll be so much easier. So practice being intentional with each line you place on canvas.
For that, you can ghost the lines (make the movement without touching the pen on the screen), or just imagine where you want the line to be.
Lineart Secret 4: Use the stabilizer to your advantage!
Clip Studio has a great stabilizer that will help you avoid unwanted wavy and wiggly lines. It can make everything look smoother and prettier!
You can find it unter Window > Tool Property > Sub Tool Detail > Correction > Stabilization:
You can click the checkbox on its side, to make sure stabilization is visible whenever you open the Tool Property box:
So this will help you make smoother lines, BUT! That’s not all. If you make it always a high number (for example, 40), it’ll be hard to make quick lines and it’ll hinder your sketches.
So you need to know how to CHANGE that stabilization to your needs.
When I’m making very long lines, I’ll usually choose high stabilization - about 40-60. But that does NOT apply to sketching, drawing short hair strands and hatching, because for those you need quick movements that the stabilizer will hinder. So for these I place the stabilization between 4-10.
So learn to change the amount of stabilization as necessary and use it to make your lines look amazing!
Lineart secret 5: Change line width to make your drawings more dynamic
One of the biggest mistakes beginners make with line is to make it all in just one thickness. Let me show you an example:
Usually, line width variation is more appreciated and shows a better understanding of art fundamentals.
So how do you vary them? Do you just choose randomly some areas to make thicker? Of course not! There are some principles to it.
1 Thicker lines can represent contact shadows
2 Use thicker lines on the outside of a curve (the part that is being pushed out from the object/character)
3 Use thicker lines to separate objects and materials -for example, on this following image, there’s a thicker line on the outside of the character:
4 Thinner lines for hatching and lines that represent texture (like inside the hair in the previous image).
5 Thicker lines to show an object is closer to the camera:
These are general principles, not absolute rules. But if you apply them to your drawings they should look better than before!
Final Thoughts
Making good lines is one of the greatest differences between amateur art and professional-looking art, so don’t slack on it!
Now that you know these secrets, go apply them to your artworks - you’ll see how much better it’ll look.
That’s it for today! I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you have any questions!
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