hey i have that book too, cptmunta!
Have you tried drawing the bg first then the characters? If you can draw people better than background, I think drawing the bg first is the better way to go since you’ll get the hardest part out of the way. YOu can draw the people to match the bg rather than the other way around.
Ok first off is there a table placed in front of them? A modern looking Chinese cafe or an old looking one? Both would work though.
Here a quick sketch of what you can do in terms of thinking about composing the picture. Maybe you can shift the character over to fit the waiter and the bartender. That is if they are sitting at a bar. Just an idea though.
Dfist is right though compose everything before you start any rendering of any sort.
http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/7831/cafe6cs.jpg
What you have looks good so far though.
SFMC: That picture is exactly what i need. Just a rough i can build on. I hope you don’t mind me pinching it. I had something really simlar in my head but was struggling with figure placement and so on.
Both you and DFist are completely right. I usually draw my backgrounds first but in this case I was thought it would be best to strike while the iron is hot (Big mistake). Cheers for the help man, you are a lifesaver. I owe you one yet again.
Hey, can we get some pro tactics/mindsets in here?
I’m not talking about small little details like “oh put a little highlight in your anime eyes”
I’m talking things on a bigger scale. Mainly this is for figure drawing. Here’s my list, I wanted to know if any of you guys can add to this.
-Draw thumbnails and then enlarge. A thumbnail is much easier to manipulate than a poster.
-Life Drawing/ Figure Drawing, Anatomy, to get the form down…
-Get a lot of critiques, and the critiques that are said more than once deserve a lot of attention.
-…draw hentai. Works for me, I’m more motivated to draw when I do… although this really shouldnt be in here.
I had a request from Rabit Wombat about how I get crisp clean inks from paper to screen. Here’s a step by step of what I do.
This is just a file prep and processing tutorial, not an actual inking tutorial. For those curious, the actual materials used were a mechanical pencil filled with red leads, and a brush pen (with actual hairs, not the felt tip ones!) filled with Rapidograph Ultradraw ink. I like to use mechanical pencils because I’m too lazy to sharpen, but Col-Erase colored pencils are what most artists prefer for drawing in color because they erase better than most colored pencils.
http://ronssketchpad.combovideos.com/linestutorial/
Also, note that while I use colored pencils so that I never have to bother erasing them, you can achieve equally crisp inks from using normal pencils, erasing them well, and levelling properly.
^ good stuff
very nice. i guess i need to sketch in another color!
thats great chainwhore 
Ok, I know how to colour under my line in PS, but how do I put my inks on top of my colour? So that it dosen’t look like I coloured over my lines.
Wombat: Well, you don’t need to draw in color, but it’s a nice little trick I like to use to streamline the process. Like I mentioned, if you erase your pencils well enough and keep your paper clean enough, scanning from that and levelling properly should give you a fine clean scan.
Deon: I’m not sure I understand your question. Can you rephrase? It sounds like you said you do know how to do it, and then asked how to do it.
my bad, lol. What Im saying is, you know how you multiply your ink layer so that you can color under your lines. After I lay down color, my inked lines get washed out cause of the color thats on top of them. How do I bring the inks back up so that they sit on top of the colors instead of under them. I guess that makes sense…
just move your ink layer on top and set it to multiply. or delete the whites alltogether.
Select the ink layer
go to channel tab
click the make selection button (dotted circle). This will select all the white on the page
hit delete, alternatively you can inverse selection and fill it with black on another layer. You can also smooth out the selection a bit with the modify>contract and feather option.
personally I’m loath to actually delete white space – I much prefer to set the lineart layer to “multiply” since deleting will kill any subtle gradiations that might exist, esp for thin strokes. If I have to keep only part of the image, then I use a layer mask to hide what I don’t want to see.
DAMN STRAIGHT
For me the multiply trick was the tip of the year. i was trying to delete all my whites before I found out about that trick and my linework was getting attacked by “Jaggies” I just Mulitply and play a bit with the levels like in Chain tut
Very nice tut by the way. It would be interesting to see everyones creative processes from concept to inks.
The method DFist mentioned should actually make an exact copy of the linework onto a transparent layer without losing any subtleties. I have several different ways that I work depending each pic and what I want to do with it, but that was the first method I learned and it’s probably the most versatile. I’m not sure it makes a difference, but I always inverted the selection and filled with black onto a new layer rather than copy the lines and delete the whites.
i wonder if there are any nice tablet excercises to adjust using a stylus
i´m not asking for private lessons i´m asking for advice
The best way to get the feeling for using a tablet is to just keep using it. You’ll eventually get used to it. Also, don’t just color with it either. Try do draw with it too. It will feel awkward at first, but after a while (for me it was about a week or two) it should feel pretty natural. Also, try to familiarize yourself with what your tablet can do with different brush settings. Mess with different settings and play around to see what results you can get. Have fun!
yea, thats something I need to do more, draw with the tablet. For some reason, I sketch better using the tablet, but if I wanted to do an actually drawing, I fail. Yo, Ron, I checked out your site again and notcie those life drawings. Man they kick ass. I just had to tell you.
thanks for the tips