Need soft shading help

Thanks Laurence your replies are always helpful.

I'll be taking that info to the art shop on the weekend to look at ink & nibs.

Oh, you don't need to make transparent areas in photoshop I know, I was experimenting with that for a reason. Which sort of worked but isn't worth going into now anyway.

Basically I'm going to go traditional with the ink & nibs (always loved working with inks and brushes in the past) and also start looking at illustrator so I have the digital world at my fingertips too.

Nice work but I see what you mean about the line. Your character looks washed out, like it is out of focus.

I know that L_Finston said that there is no way to do this digitally and I am far behind all of you in skill but maybe Painter could do the trick.

Ok I love the soft shading technique used in Disney and Dreamworks 2D animation films(each line is a different color instead of all black lines) , I have done the technique in flash, I draw on paper ,scan the drawing and trace the drawing in flash (I can't draw in flash) I like how my drawings turned out, but I lose some of the original quality of my line art, you know how flash is.:rolleyes:

Is there way I can keep my line quality, a different software or another way of doing this technique?:confused:

Here a sample of my art using the soft shading technique:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v310/gear3/AK25c.jpg

I don't the have the original line art of the pic.

Flash is what you put into it. It won't do the work for you, but the tools to make your sort of work are definitely available in the the program.

I don't know what your budget is, but there's almost sure to be a version of Flipbook that'll fit within in.

In Flipbook you can scan pencil drawings, then quickly and easily change the line colors. It has to be done on a frame by frame basis, but you can apply it to individual sections of a drawing. It's a little like using the "Paint Selections" option in Flash, where you change the colors of the lines.

Which I just realized isn't what your'e talking about. But Flipbook, being a bitmap program, lets you have softer edges, ala pencil, because it replicates the old way of doing the lines on one side of the cel and the paint/colors on the other side.

Check 'em out: www.digicelinc.com

This was a bit of a throwaway comment. What it really meant was that I like hand-drawn artwork better.

If you must use computer graphics, you can just draw in black or some other color and replace it in an image manipulation package such as GIMP or ImageMagick. I'm virtually certain that this is possible in Photoshop, too.

It's not a race or a contest. At least it shouldn't be. Why don't you post some samples of your work sometime?

Laurence

I should have thought my comment through better, I was thinking your meaning was a preference to hand-drawn work over the digital. Sorry

I am getting a little furstrated with my progress, but I am sticking to this.
I have sofware that I am trying to learn for authoring websites, I really need to get back and finish the tutorial and start posting my stuff. So I will shoot for May.

I've just started scanning in my pencil drawings too and want the black outlines to be stronger. At the moment it is hurting my art as usually the line work is my stongest point (rather than a flair with form) and I'm not getting it up to scratch in a digital way yet.

Like L Finston said I am keen to try ink (& nib) but have to track some down. Any nib recommendations while I'm asking?

I am also going to try tracing my drawings on my lightbox (yes L Finston I finally got that home made pegbar done and it works just fine, a two holed cheapo job but thanks for advice in another thread) using a variety of felt pens. I work quickly and accurately with those so it could be good.

What I've done so far is to scan the pencil drawings into photoshop, make all areas beside the line work transparent and then boost up the contrast/levels to deepen the pencil to black.

Then I've colour filled the transparent areas and copied the darkened outline layer (with transparencies) over the top so the lines appear stronger and aren't as weakened by fills.

It works ok but is time consuming. So is there a faster way of filling in photoshop without always going through the Edit>Fill menu?

Or maybe I wouldn't need those steps if my lines were better before they got into photoshop (ie me inking them first)?

Any suggestions would be great as I am not going to get good enough with a tablet to ink lines digitally anytime soon.

I really think your biggest problem with this picture is your use of gradients or lighting, not the lines.

Hey you can do all kinds of things in flash.