A Fine Line

You might not think a line would mean so much. But man would you be wrong. Though I suspect the real answer is: man would you be right and I just get hung up on the weirdest details.

Okay, so what line am I freakin' talking about? Drawing lines. Cartoon lines. I'm doing my cartoons with the computer these days, but I haven't found a line (or, in the parlance of the computer software, the "brush" that I really like).

I've drawn a lot of lines, let me tell you. A lot. It seems like I've tried every brush that Corel Painter X has to offer, yet every time I experiment with my drawing I find more brushes I hadn't noticed before.

I use a knock-off 9x12 USB drawing tablet. When I say "knock-off" I mean it's not an industry darling Wacom Intuos3 drawing tablet with 6D Pen. Those suckers are expensive! So I bought a cheap ($100) knock-off on eBay. Works great, though I'd love to try a Wacom and see if I'm missing anything. I assume I'm missing a subtlety of line that the knock-off just isn't capable of).

But it's the lines, man. The lines! I'm looking for something that looks like it's been done with pencil or pen and paper.

And every time I think I've found the perfect line/brush I find I don't like it after a few days and I draw more lines. There's a lot of scribbling going on. The pics I'm showing are for display purposes. I have scribbled hundreds of lines to find the line I really like.

Part of the problem is that I'll find a line that looks cool at 100% "zoom" but when it's shrunk down to cartoon size, it loses it's character. It's cool.

So I draw more lines. Right now I'm using a canvas of 3000 x 3000 pixels with a dpi of 300. So at full size, the lines might work. But then I have to shrink them down so that I can print them on paper. At that size, the lines can go awry.

And so I draw more lines. The worst part? I haven't even gotten to the characters yet. What will my people and animals look like?

Ack.