Tablet Help

[whuntumighty]

finally bought a tablet (intuos4) and getting used to it has been a challenge. are there any in depth tutorials out there for illustrator that you could recomend? i have so many sketches that i want to ink. i have tried making my own brushes but they dont react the way i want them to.

i also use smart guides and when i begin a piece with the pen tool i outline a silhouette and go from there cutting out shaddows and such. with the pen i can hold shift after making a path and connect anchors (the smart guide says anchor) so theres one solid path but when i try to outline with the pencil this doesnt seem to be an option and im left with a bunch of separate paths. whats up with that? any direction will help. thanks

attached is a pic of the style of how i would like to learn how to ink my art.

[Husker]

If you have CS4 you can use the blob tool to simulate a varied pressure stroke with a Wacom or other tablet. If not try using some of the default ink or calligraphy brushes. You can always expand their appearance and then manipulate the shapes manually.

[Lukas Engqvist]

Fairly round and varying pressure almost the whole range of the size.
IMO these are the settings:
In appearance dissable new art has basic appearance. This way your you don't need to reselect the graphic style (opacity, blendmode etc) for each stroke
(I don't like the blob tool because I don't get overlapping strokes)

In the brush preferences (double click the brush tool)
I want fidelity and smoothness to be low, can allways simplify path after.
uncheck Fill new brush strokes
uncheck Keep Selected (I want to draw, draw, draw)
Edit Selected paths. (it is allways possible to ctrl/cmd click a path to select it. If i need to fine tune (or delete) a path I can select it.

Save your brushes as graphic styles, there you can save opacity, blend mode, colour and effects (eg feather).

The way the stroke varies is locked to the original stroke. Editing a stroke will redistribute the pressure information, so if you do not get the thickness variation right you will have to redraw the stroke.

You cannot erase a pressure bruush or the stroke is uniformly the thickest value. The only tool that you can use to crop a preassure stroke is the scissors. I have reported in bug and request for better editability… here the blob works better, only it does not work for my style of drawing. (some examples in my gallery)

Looking at your attatched example, work in one (or more) layer(s) for the strokes, then work on a layer below for blocking colours.

[Scott Weichert]

Blob Brush in CS4, absolutely. Any other method will take a lot more time.

[Lukas Engqvist]

Seeing the high push for blob brush i mean.

I can agree blobbing for blocking coloursor coloouring in but no way for the thin strokes. Blob brush makes one contigunous object.

The selection limits merge works for merging to a specific, but having nothing selected will merge to some object with the same colour.

If you use the brush however, each stroke remains seperate, this also means that any number of strokes can be thinned or thickened maintaining the pressure stroke by changing the point size in the stroke dialogue.

Those saying the blob brush, have you actually tried doing it? Inking a sketch I mean? I tried it as soon as it came out and must say for inking IMO it sucks. For blocking it is ok.

[Scott Weichert]

I've used it for inking. Its great!

You do have to pay attention to the merge since the ability to limit the merge is somewhat broke in CS4. But overall it's fast. I may be at an advantage with a tablet because I have no problem with thin strokes and the blob brush, it's all just pressure.

[Lukas Engqvist]

Well it's probably a matter of preference. I just got fed up with not having control over merging and if i wanted to redo, move or thicken a stroke (or group of strokes) it was not possible.

I guess switching and locking layers it would be possible to control what strokes merge and what strokes don't.
The important thing when comparing the two is to know the options and how you can play around with them.

I normaly do life and figure drawing, wich gives me 30 sec - 5minutes per pose, and I didn't find the time was enough to play around with merging. And since I draw mostly from live model, some times I need to delete a stroke that would have been merged had I used the blob brush.

[Scott Weichert]

The merge is broken. Wish they'd start releasing more X.x.x updates.