Furry 101

Starting with the sketch I created in the last tutorial, I’ll be showing you a couple of ways to “ink” your art. I’ve opened up the file and used the “Opacity” tool to set the sketch to 40% opacity. This fades out the art to make it easier to work over the top. You can see the difference in this image:

Click for the full size…
Ok, the next thing is to create some inking brushes to use. I use three basic types:

1. A brush which has it’s opacity and it’s thickness set by the stylus pen pressure on my Wacom tablet
2. A brush that is the same as above, but doesn’t fade – it doesn’t have any opacity altering properties, only thickness. This I find is best for inking.
3. A brush that does not alter in thickness or opacity. This is useful of painting in large areas of colour.

All of these brushes I use: I alter the thickness of the brushes using [ or ] as and when I need them thicker or thinner. Here’s the setting for the 2nd, most used brush:

Once I create a brush I add it to the “Custom tools” pre set menu, so I can grab them whenever I want them without having to re-set them all.

I make a new layer over the top of the sketch art – which is three separate layers. I’ve bundled them all together into a group by hitting the group button to create a new group, and dragging all the layers into it. That lets me treat all three layers as a single layer.

Now I need to decide how big I want the image to be. I want to create a fairly high resolution image. So I use the  Crop (C) tool to crop the image down and get rid of all the unused space around my sketch.

Then I go to Image > Image Size > and set the height to 1200. If “Constrain proportions” is on, the width will be automatically set. This gives me a nice large image – but the sketch art becomes blurred as it is made bigger than the original. This is fine, because the sketch is just a guide.

Now lets look at what the different inking tools look like…

1. Thickness and Opacity set to “Pen Pressure”.
   
2. Thickness set to “Pen Pressure” and clamped so that it cannot go below 25% of the maximum diameter
   
3. Unchanging pixel width
   

The #1 tool has a greater contrast between thin and tick strokes, but tends to fade out too much with the thinner strokes.

The #2 tool is quite good, and by setting the “Minimum thickness” clamp to 0%, you can get a much finer stroke – but again it can thin out too much.

The third tool, #3 gives the finest detail line but has the least smooth line.

You can use the Eraser Tool (E) to further fine out the points and curves of a line…

Before and after refining with Erase

By dropping the brush size you can use it for adding detail. This is what I use the #1 tool for:

For the larger, straighter lines of the desk and so on you can use the stylus, which can give a more cartoony, softer feel to the lines, or you can use the line tool (Shift+U to cycle through the shapes tool to get it).

However, there’s a better way to line an item, using the Vector tools. Select the #2 brush tool, and then select the Pen tool (P). Click to set an anchor point at the desk’s  closes corner, then again at the next closest corner, and then click again to add a second point at the far corner:

Now, with the pen tool still selected, right click and select “Stroke Path”. Make sure “Simulate pressure” is ticked in the pop up box and hit OK. Then right click the path and select “Delete Path”. This gives you very straight lines, that have a pleasingly variable thickness.

Right now I’m just going to ink up our character, and put in a desktop – the background and foreground I’ll handle with separate layers and cover in a different tutorial.

Here’s the results – first with the background sketch, then without.

In the next tutorial, I’ll show how to construct a background.