How To Smooth Line Art In Photoshop

Cleaning Upward Lineart in Photoshop

Take a look at the finished painting in this series

Cleaning up lineart in Photoshop can aid give your work that earth-shaking professional person feel.

This lesson will teach you everything yous demand to know most drawing precise lines and, along the way, you'll pick upwards some really useful tips that will help you in every other attribute of your creative career.

Are yous prepare? In that instance, let's step on the gas and get going!

Laying Downwardly the Lineart

As we mentioned in the previous lesson, there are several means of creating the lineart for your finished painting.

So, create a new layer and permit's become this motor running!

Cartoon freehand is smashing if yous desire to create organic, curvy lines for characters, but when it comes to vehicles, you might detect you prefer a more precise method for cleaning up lineart in Photoshop. And, that's where Photoshop's Pen Tool comes in – it allows you to achieve just that.

Whichever method you lot choose, there are some bully tips in this video to help you get the effects you desire. And, don't forget, you're free to use a combination of the two if you lot prefer.

Here, April explains both methods then yous tin cull the i that'due south right for you.

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Cartoon Freehand

When drawing freehand, the starting time thing yous need to do is set up your brushes to requite y'all a nice clean line to describe with.

To exercise this, open up the Brushes Palette and select Shape Dynamics and Pen Pressure. And so, tick the box that says Smoothing.

After this, accommodate the size of your brush to around 7px and yous're adept to get!

When cartoon freehand, be prepared to hit Ctrl + Z frequently to undo your final line and re-draw it.

Don't worry – no-one gets it right the showtime time! Cleaning up lineart in Photoshop tin can take a fiddling time at first, but it's definitely worth it!

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Rotating Your Canvas

When cartoon freehand, y'all'll frequently find you lot need to describe lines which don't follow the natural arc of your arm.

Drawing against this arc is actually hard and you'll most likely end up with shaky, jagged lines which don't look practiced.

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An easy way around this problem is to rotate your canvas using the Rotate View Tool, which y'all can admission from your Toolbar or by simply striking R.

In one case you've selected this, you'll be able to spin your canvass around at will, which gives you the freedom to depict whatsoever line post-obit your arm's natural arc or menstruum.

A good example of this is the forepart of the hood, where April rotates her canvas to depict this line freehand. Try it yourself – notice how difficult it is to draw against the arc of your arm?

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Yous tin utilize this technique throughout your cartoon to create nice, polish lines.

Don't sweat it if y'all go over any of the lines you drew earlier – simply used the Erase Tool to make clean them up before you lot motion on to the next part.

Go along rotating and accept fun!

Using Dissimilar Line Thicknesses to add Involvement

Some other useful technique when drawing lines is to use dissimilar thicknesses of line depending on which part of the car you're working on.

For example, y'all could utilize a thicker line for the outline of the car, a medium line for the other areas and a actually sparse line for cutlines and detail – this is useful for when yous want to just requite an indication of a line that doesn't detract from the rest of your illustration.

This is a really good technique to adopt when creating crisp, make clean lineart, as it will help add visual interest to your cartoon or painting. And, like all the other tips in this serial, you'll be able to use it when cartoon anything else you tin can think of!

Keep going through your drawing, rotating your canvas and adding lines. Eventually, y'all'll cease up with a really make clean-looking lineart layer but yous nevertheless may want to make some lines fifty-fifty more precise – well, that's where the Pen Tool comes in!

Pen Tool Do

If y'all've never used the Pen Tool before, it can take a little getting used to. To practice using this, start draw a freehand bend and so go to the Pen Tool icon on your Toolbar.

Side by side, add a point at the beginning of the curve and 1 at the stop – y'all can also add together more than points if the curve turns into a wavy line as in this video.

When cleaning up lineart in Photoshop, you'll notice whatsoever lines drawn with the Pen Tool won't testify up on your lineart layer. This is because when yous draw with the Pen Tool, you lot're creating a Work Path that needs to be manipulated first before it will show up.

We'll come back to this later, but for now, choose the Direct Selection Tool from your Toolbar, click on the path you've just fatigued, and then go back to the Pen Tool.

You should now see a + appear just above the tool's icon when you hover over the path. It's this which volition enable you to add together more than points so you can create a perfectly precise curve.

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Add another point in the eye of the get-go and end points, go back to your Direct Option Tool, and you'll exist able to elevate this heart betoken up to create your curve.

You'll discover that your signal now has toggles on information technology which you can employ to dispense the line.

These are known as handles and are used frequently in any kind of vector-based digital artwork.

You tin move these handles in any direction y'all want to create your curve and using this method gives y'all complete control over any lines you depict.

In the next lesson, y'all'll learn how to convert the lines drawn using the Pen Tool into actual lines which show upwards in your lineart layer. You tin even assign a brush mode to these lines so they blend in perfectly with the rest of your drawing.

Nosotros hope y'all've found this lesson on cleaning upwards lineart in Photoshop useful – don't forget to go out us a comment in the box below and tell us how you lot're getting on!

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