The Figure tool

This is where you can find the figure tool. The figure tool is very useful, having three sub categories. Direct draw, Stream line and saturated line. For this tutorial we'll be using Direct draw. The settings I use in this tutorial are straight line, curve, polyline, and continuous curve.

 

Painting buildings is considered to be difficult because of the straight lines and crisp edges that you need to paint. The figure tool can help easily achieve this. Let's start with the sketch!

Step 1 - Sketch

This is where you can find the ruler. Before we start sketching, we must separate the canvas into thirds. This can be done by using the ruler and placing two evenly spaced straight lines down vertically and horizontally.

To make perfectly straight lines, hold shift while using the figure tool. On the left are lines made without holding shift, on the right are lines with holding shift.

You can also give the line different styles and shapes under the tool properties! Here's an example of using the dashed line.

I also used the curve line tool in this sketch. To use it, just drag from where you want the curve to start to where you want it to end. Then pull your mouse out in the direction you want the curve to go and click when it looks right.

Here's the sketch using the figure tool! I used a mix of shifting line and not shifting to create evenly spaced lines on the buildings. I used the curve tool with the dash brush shape to indicate where to paint clouds and treelines.

Step 2 - Layout

For the layout we're going to use the polyline and continuous curve settings. Go to line/fill (pictured above) and select "Create fill". This will give you clean, flat shapes for you to paint on top of.

To use the polyline and continuous curve tools, click where you want the shape to start, then click along where you want the shape to go. Click the beginning of the shape to close the line and create the shape. Here is an example of both tools. To create these shapes I started at 1, then 2, then 3, then wrapped back around to one.

Using the polyline, I roughly followed the edges of my sketch to create flats for my buildings. I did the buildings on different layers, the furthest first and so on. This way the building edges don't blend together when you paint them.

The buildings that im painting have a lot of decorative curved edges. Using the continuous line (curve setting set to spine) I clicked the high and low points of the curved edges. Then I brought the line back to the beginning. Now we have a clean curve to paint over!

Step 3 - Render

Now you can render as usual! With the clean shapes we created, you can set your painting layers to "lock transparent pixels" and paint without blending away the base color. I also used the figure tool to create the detailing and trim on the buildings.

Step 4 - Finishing touches

Now all thats left to do is add your overlays and lighting effects and you're done!

Thank you for reading!

Thank you so much for reading my tutorial, I hope it helped! To see more of my art, you can follow me on twitter @EpiphanyJournee