Pen Tool Rocks
Time for more pen tool babble. Ok first off, the pen tool is just uber-amazing. It does take a little while to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it suddenly becomes pretty much the best way to ink drawings. I still like to sketch with the tablet, but I now love the pen tool as well.
Ender, since you don’t have a tablet, you may want to try this out! You could just scan in a picture, and then clean it up by inking with the pen tool.
It took me about 15 minutes to learn to use the pen tool effectively, using only the Onezumi tutorial. Here are the important things I learned:
- You do not need to use very many anchor points most of the time.
- Make sure you are using pen path and not pen shapes.
- The most important thing to remember is to drag your anchor points if you think you will need to edit the path.
- Whenver you drag an anchor point (instead of just clicking once to place it), it spawns a tangential line with movable points (hold ALT to move them). One movable point will be for shaping the line you just drew. The second point will be for shaping the next path line you draw.
- You can even drag your initial anchor point. This ensures you will always have two movable points to shape your line with (one at each end of the path).
Once you figure out what I’m talking about (it’s hard to visualize in your mind), you’ve pretty much figured out the pen tool. It took me about another 5 minutes to get good at matching my pen paths with the sketch. But after that, it was smooth sailing.
Before, trying to go over my sketches with my tablet/stylus was annoying and time-consuming. However, the pen tool allows me to use my mouse and ink my drawings perfectly with just a little erasing to bring out sharp points. Even better, you do not have to do it all at once. It’s difficult to mess up, unlike using the tablet/stylus to ink, and the results are consistent.
Art Thoughts | Kabitzin 5/17/2007
