Do you have anything good on line art in SAI? I've looked in the #inking tag and I can't quite make sense out of it.
There are some features intended to aid inking in SAI, but I personally don’t like them very much for a couple of reasons:the first being that I’m mainly a painter so inking isn’t something I do a great deal of (especially not with the vector layers!)the other being that I use lots of different mediums and programs - so things like stabilisers? They’re not very useful in the long run, being able to draw a neat line in sai with the stabilisers on doesn’t let me do the same in tvpaint, or on a light table!I personally keep it on 0 and don’t really recommend going above 3, purely because I think it’s better in the long run to teach yourself to draw smooth lines. If you find yourself relying on them, I’d suggest gradually reducing the amount SAI smoothens your lines!—REGARDLESS, the actual process of inking in SAI is the same as anywhere else.
If you’re finding the stuff in my inking tag a little confusing, then allow me to break down the basics those posts are talking about for you!First, there are two things you are aiming to give the illusion of in inking whilst only using two colours: Distance and light.Distance is the easiest to understand and show. Remember on the old windows computers how there was always a photo like this on there?
This is a great example of what we call ‘atmospheric perspective’, wherein the further away something gets from the viewer, the more particles in the atmosphere begin to filter the light and make things hazy.Or more simply, the contrast is reduced and the colour gets closer to the sky. So, when colouring, the further something gets away, the less contrast there should be and the more it should blend in with the atmosphere. Most often this is blue, but indoor it could be yellow, or in the evening it could be red.When inking, the way to show less contrast is to reduce the lineweight:
This is useful to remember for backgrounds obviously, but also if you’re foreshortening something, the closer something is the thicker you want to be making the lines. This post shows off this concept very well!How extremely you vary the lineweight is up to you, in this post I’m varying it a lot to make it easier to notice.—And the other thing is shading, which you’re probably most familiar with. As things get darker, the thickness of the line should increase. To show you what I mean, here’s the same sketch but inked to two different light sources:
Looking at these two pictures, even though there isn’t really any shading you should get a sense that the light is coming from different places, right?
If you look at western comics, DC in particular and especially the ones from the last couple decades, a lot of the shading is incorporated into the linework itself.
That’s what this post is about, and it’s basically just what happens when you increase the lineweight in the shadows so much that they become the shadows, and the lost edges discussed in the post are what happen when the lines in the light get so thin they disappear.
When you combine these two concepts, you get things like explained in this video, and this video!
As for producing clean lines themselves, you want to use as few lines as possible.
That’s what these exercises are for!
in particular, the one on the left here:
The exercise is to draw a curve (or well in this case circles) which meets three of the dots you have put down. The aim is to improve your line drawing aim, so that when you’re inking you can draw curves that follow your sketch with one line:
I hope that helps! Just keep in mind: use as few lines as possible, and vary lineweight according to the light and distance
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