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Post by pavaro on Oct 1, 2016 3:03:15 GMT -9
I have a problem with my line art. Exactly I mean thickness of my brushes / lines. I don't know how thick should be line while drawing characters. I understand that while sketching are different lines but what should be the standard? Here is that what I mean.
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Post by Vermin King on Oct 1, 2016 6:09:12 GMT -9
I fight with that myself
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Post by jeffgeorge on Oct 1, 2016 6:54:41 GMT -9
I don't have a firm rule yet, but I consistently find that if I draw with lines that look right on the original, over-sized version of the item or figure--which for me is typically about four or five times the size/resolution of the intended final product--my lines are consistently too narrow when I scale the figure down to 28mm size. In my most common workflow, the only thing I do on paper is a pencil sketch. I scan the pencil sketch into the computer, and then "ink" it in GIMP or Photoshop. I work with a tiny second view open next to the main window, with the image scaled down to about the size it will be in the final version, so that I have some idea of how the finished product will look. I usually find myself beefing up the lines as I go.
It's very easy to include detail in a mini that will be lost when its scaled down, printed out, and then set on a table among a couple dozen other minis. At least for my own work, I find that fewer, bolder lines and details make for a more impressive mini on the game table.
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Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 1, 2016 7:58:14 GMT -9
Here's the line art from my latest mini: The important thing to me is generally not the thickness of the lines, but the variation of the thickness. I usually put thin lines on the side that is facing the light and thick lines on the side that's facing away, and I'll generally put a very thick line on the shadow side of any object that is in front of something else. My goal there is generally to imply some 3d form without having to rely on colour or hatching. When I get it right, the colour and the lines work together to create a very bold 3d form. (Note: This actually reduced quite a bit. The original is much bigger because I don't create the art solely to be used as miniatures, and my lines can be anywhere from 3 pixels to 20 pixels thick. Sometimes even more than that. When I reduce down to mini size, the lines tend to all be about 1 or 2 pixels wide but the lightness and heaviness is still there.)
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Post by chiefasaur on Oct 1, 2016 8:35:48 GMT -9
I don't worry too much about line thickness. When scaled down to 1.25" my linework becomes a lot more uniform. As long as you stay somewhat consistent on your figures, work with whatever width you're comfortable with. I find color blocking and silhouette to be much more important than lines when working at this size. Colors are going to pop a lot more then lines on the tabletop. I try to mass light and dark color blocks next to each other, and when a character is one uniform color, or all the color blocks are similar, then I carve out the "geometry" with shadows.
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Post by pavaro on Oct 1, 2016 10:16:27 GMT -9
Thin lines are good because you can give more details but the figure could "disappear" after a reduction. Thicker lines are clear, but it seems that is too black. According to you, which my sketch is better (as indicated above)?
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Post by chiefasaur on Oct 1, 2016 10:35:31 GMT -9
According to you, which my sketch is better (as indicated above)? Thick will probably stand out more. Have you run a test print? That's the best way to find out.
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Post by mesper on Oct 1, 2016 11:20:54 GMT -9
The important thing to me is generally not the thickness of the lines, but the variation of the thickness. I usually put thin lines on the side that is facing the light and thick lines on the side that's facing away, and I'll generally put a very thick line on the shadow side of any object that is in front of something else. My goal there is generally to imply some 3d form without having to rely on colour or hatching. When I get it right, the colour and the lines work together to create a very bold 3d form. This. BTW that's technique widely used in many classic (ie not CG) comic-books (Note: This actually reduced quite a bit. The original is much bigger because I don't create the art solely to be used as miniatures, and my lines can be anywhere from 3 pixels to 20 pixels thick. Sometimes even more than that. When I reduce down to mini size, the lines tend to all be about 1 or 2 pixels wide but the lightness and heaviness is still there.) IMHO you may want min 3-4 pixels wide "thin lines" because of issues with colouring - black outline should overlap coloured area (so lineart layer always on top and most preferably multipy or in some cases linear burn mode) - so assuming that you have black lineart line which separates 2 colour areas, each of these areas should be beneath black line like min. 1 or 2 pixels - the goal is to avoid any "gaps" between lineart and coloured parts (and then when it comes to pro-print it becomes even more important, but that's another story) Then, again as bravesirkevin mentioned - original lineart preferably should be substantially bigger than 30mm mini, so working with ca 15-20cm figurine you just have to use thicker brushes. Actually long time ago I wrote some sort of hands-on regarding colouring and scaling figurines (based on my Lich Warlord, but these images are not available at the moment)
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Post by pavaro on Oct 1, 2016 23:22:01 GMT -9
According to you, which my sketch is better (as indicated above)? Thick will probably stand out more. Have you run a test print? That's the best way to find out. I printed both variants. Thicker seems more pronounced when the character has less detail. The problem is when a character is wearing more items. It is black by the black lines. Thin lines make it possible to add more items. However, after reducing some lines disappear. I thought about the color lineart but it seems to me that the figure even more disappears. Maybe the problem is the size of my sketches? Thicker - sketch about 7 cm Thinner - a sketch about 10 cm
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Post by jeffgeorge on Oct 2, 2016 9:29:34 GMT -9
Thick will probably stand out more. Have you run a test print? That's the best way to find out. I printed both variants. Thicker seems more pronounced when the character has less detail. The problem is when a character is wearing more items. It is black by the black lines. Thin lines make it possible to add more items. However, after reducing some lines disappear. I thought about the color lineart but it seems to me that the figure even more disappears. Maybe the problem is the size of my sketches? Thicker - sketch about 7 cm Thinner - a sketch about 10 cm Stressing over the measurements of the original sketch misses the point, I think. What matters is the thickness of the line relative to the overall dimensions of the image. The size of the sketch is only important if the thickness of the lines in the two sketches is the same. What follows is strictly my opinion, based more on general work for reproduction than miniatures-specific experience (obviously), so take it as such: If the purpose of the drawing is to produce a miniature that will be between 1.5 and 3cm high, adding details to the figure that you can see well at 7-10 cm but can't discern at 2.5cm doesn't help. If you're drawing for a miniature, the final product will be less than 3cm tall, and viewed from 1 to 3m away. Sure, if you pick miniatures up one by one and examine them closely, you can appreciate all that fine detail you put into the original, 10cm line art--but that's not how miniatures get used. Time and effort put into details you can't see on the table in play are wasted--the place to put your time and talent is into deciding which details are critical to making the figure unique, and emphasize those while eliminating all the rest. Now that I reread that sentence, I realize that the decision process that goes into drawing effective miniatures--focus on the character's defining details, and eliminate the rest--is the same process that goes into good cartooning and caricatures. The goal is not a photorealistic reproduction of the character, but a version that captures its personality and essence. To illustrate this point, I found two large illustrations on the internet, and reduced them to table-top miniature size. One of the illustrations is a straight-up cartoon, with simple lines and colors, while the other is a much more detailed, "realistic" ink-and-watercolor-style illustration. Both start out at 13cm, and are reduced to 30mm; you decide which one works better at the small size. Both are excellent drawings, but they were likely produced for different purposes. The rabbit was drawn to "read" well from a distance, in a fraction of a second, while the dwarf was drawn to be held close to the viewer, studied and savored. Both are valid approaches, but one works better on the table at 30mm than the other, at least in my opinion. As working or aspiring miniature artists, I think we have more to learn from the artists atWarner Brothers and Pixar than from those at Wizards of the Coast or Paizo, no matter how realistic, beautiful and amazing their artwork is. The natural endpoint of this discussion is that, for me at least, the papercraft minis that work best at their stated purpose as game pieces are generally the ones that most people perceive as "cartoony" or even manga-like. But when you look closely at the metal (or plastic, these days) miniatures that cardstock figures are supposed to replace, you'll see that the best ones are pretty cartoony as well, with exaggerated proportions and over-sized detail, so that they "read" when viewed on the game table. I have printed and actively use minis from several artists, but the overwhelming majority of the ones that make it to my table are on the more cartoony end of the spectrum. That's because, in my opinion at least, figures with simple, bold illustrations are generally more powerful on the table than finely-detailed ones, no matter the quality of the original artwork. Again, all this is based on my experience and opinion, and others, I am sure, will feel differently--and that's OK.
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Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 2, 2016 10:22:25 GMT -9
You make some excellent points there jeffgeorge! Bugs definitely does work better but it's not just the simplicity... There are a lot of other important contributing factors: He's got a strongly defined silhouette that is uniquely Bugs Bunny, and he's in an action pose that tells a clear story even if you're just glancing at him briefly. There's clear contrast between the pools of colour that make up the form. The dwarf, on the other hand, has a weak, generic silhouette and his pose tells you nothing. The lightest highlight on him is barely any brighter than the darkest shadow and so even at full scale it's hard to make out the form... when it's reduced you mostly just see a dark grey blob. With a stronger pose, more interesting silhouette and a ton more contrast I reckon he'd actually work fine on the tabletop. (Side note: The simplification of cartoon characters is mostly a result of the fact that they need to be drawn over and over again ad nauseum. 6 times for a single second of cheap animation, but it can go all the way up to 24 times for a single second of the really good stuff... Your average 10 minute short, you're looking at hundreds (or even thousands) of drawings for each character, and thus stripping out the detail saves you hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars. Comic books are a sort of middle ground between an animation and a once-off drawing and they only require dozens of drawings of each character per issue, so with those they do simplify the costumes a bit but they still go to town with the detail on the shading.)
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Post by pavaro on Oct 2, 2016 10:47:23 GMT -9
I understand that simplification is some reference point. But what if I have a soldier with his equipment? I want to design a simplified characters but partially real. This means that I have to give up some of the equipment on the advantage of transparency?
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Post by jeffgeorge on Oct 2, 2016 11:12:12 GMT -9
You make some excellent points there jeffgeorge ! Bugs definitely does work better but it's not just the simplicity... There are a lot of other important contributing factors: He's got a strongly defined silhouette that is uniquely Bugs Bunny, and he's in an action pose that tells a clear story even if you're just glancing at him briefly. There's clear contrast between the pools of colour that make up the form. The dwarf, on the other hand, has a weak, generic silhouette and his pose tells you nothing. The lightest highlight on him is barely any brighter than the darkest shadow and so even at full scale it's hard to make out the form... when it's reduced you mostly just see a dark grey blob. With a stronger pose, more interesting silhouette and a ton more contrast I reckon he'd actually work fine on the tabletop. (Side note: The simplification of cartoon characters is mostly a result of the fact that they need to be drawn over and over again ad nauseum. 6 times for a single second of cheap animation, but it can go all the way up to 24 times for a single second of the really good stuff... Your average 10 minute short, you're looking at hundreds (or even thousands) of drawings for each character, and thus stripping out the detail saves you hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars. Comic books are a sort of middle ground between an animation and a once-off drawing and they only require dozens of drawings of each character per issue, so with those they do simplify the costumes a bit but they still go to town with the detail on the shading.) I don't disagree with any of what you say here, Kevin. Even so, I think that for the purpose of making tabletop gaming minis, in general, the more detail one adds, the greater the risk that things can go wrong and the figure becomes muddy and indistinct on the table. Really talented and experienced artists--yourself being one of the best examples of such--can manage this risk quite effectively, because you have much better understanding of how to get back much of the detail that can be lost in reduction through techniques like pose and contrasts of tone and hue, as you mention. But for a lot of us, when working at a scale where many of your lines are being reduced to 1 pixel or less, introducing a lot of super-fine detail is courting disappointment.
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Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 2, 2016 14:10:54 GMT -9
I understand that simplification is some reference point. But what if I have a soldier with his equipment? I want to design a simplified characters but partially real. This means that I have to give up some of the equipment on the advantage of transparency? Put in as much detail as you feel you need to, but make sure that what you've put in there stands out clearly by using contrast to make it pop! If it's too small to see, even with high contrast, and it doesn't really need to be there, then you're better off leaving it out.
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Post by pavaro on Oct 2, 2016 19:54:45 GMT -9
Thank for all suggestions. I will try to analyze it.
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Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 3, 2016 8:52:06 GMT -9
This video on the subject popped up in my Youtube feed today and it actually covers the topic quite well.
I'd recommend checking out some of his other videos too. He's absolutely one of my favourites on the topic of pen-and-ink linework! I've learned so much from his tutorials and demonstrations.
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Post by pavaro on Oct 9, 2016 20:05:16 GMT -9
Of course these are models in the early phase. Which one you like more?
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Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 10, 2016 1:29:44 GMT -9
The one on the left for me!
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Post by pavaro on Oct 10, 2016 6:16:01 GMT -9
The one on the left for me! Can I know why?
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Post by pavaro on Oct 10, 2016 7:46:29 GMT -9
Here are next sketches. Please tell me which is better?
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Post by chiefasaur on Oct 10, 2016 14:15:26 GMT -9
I'd have to say I prefer the cleaner lines of the soldier on the left. I'm not entirely sure what he's doing in that pose though, jerking off a ghost? I'd honestly say developing dynamic, identifiable silhouettes is more important than fretting over line-width when you're dealing with figures that are 1.25" tall.
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Post by pavaro on Oct 10, 2016 20:00:20 GMT -9
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