Pentool Part II

Written by Rook | 29 November 2009

Foreword: Yes, yes. It is once again that time. The time where I teach you all my little tips, tricks, and hints on how to work with digital art. This time I'm not the only one who had a hand in this tutorial. Due to her extreme generosity, miss Jamie Svboda (aka HelloEarth) has provided me with a sketch that I could use for tutorials. Even better, the sketch was of me! Aw, its like fanart AND free help. The least you could do is click the above link and check out her gallery, as it is downright awesome. A few things that need to be mentioned before the tutorial begins: This is part TWO to a tutorial. Which means there is a part one. If you do not know the basic functions of the pen tool, you MUST read part one to at least get a basic knowledge. I took a lot of liberties with part two, skipping over things that I went over in part one. So, if you haven't, read part one. If you have, you can get ready to begin! Also, this was written using photoshop 7.0. I have no idea where the line size jitter is in CS. Sooo... Sorry CS users. Right, right. ONTO THE TUTORIAL!

2009 Edit: This is old as hell, but it is actually one of the better tutorials out there. If you're like most of the photoshop users who have upgraded to a CS-based photoshop, everything is pretty much in the same area, and works the exact same way as Photoshop 7.0. So, no worries about that. I do apologize that this looks kind of old and crappy, but as stated, it is almost 4 years old at this point, and I'm not redoing it. Just deal with my old and amazing tutorial. You're lucky you're even getting one.

01. As always, you're going to start with a sketch. Preferably a big one. The one I'm showing you right now is left under 50% right now, just to show you what we're going to be working with. (Aww, aren't I cute?)

02. The next thing we need to do is go and change some little settings in order to get that classy varied line width that we all know and love so much.
A) Before we start fussing with the pen tool, we gotta select the brush tool. Otherwise, who knows what you'll end up with.
B) Select the brush size you want. I'm going with 5px for this drawing.Make sure you select a HARD brush. that will closely match the THICKEST line width you need.
C) Select the "Brushes" panel from the top right corner of your screen
D) In the "Brush Tip Shape" submenu, set the spacing to 1%. You could leave it at the default 25%, but I just generally feel safer with the 1%. Less gaps and what have you.

03. Now here is where we set what we want our lineart to vary to. If you take a look, you can see a setting called Minimum Diameter. What this does, is tells your pentool (or graphics tablet, but that's another story for someone else to explain) what it should drop the line taper to. If I leave it at 1%, it will drop it down to 1% of 5px. Which is...very small. So, I'm going to put it on 47%, which will drop it down to a little below 2.5px at the end. Why 47% and not 50%? Why not?

04: Now, the way you choose to trace over your drawing with the pentool will make it behave differently to being "stroked." Here we can see that I've gone ahead and treated the bangs as one continuous line. If this is what you plan to do, go ahead and right click and select "Stroke." MAKE SURE YOU CHECK "SIMULATE PRESSURE." This is what makes your lines a varied width. After doing that, you can see the result is something like this:

04b. As you can see, the line goes from being thin, to thick, to thin again. I do not generally use this method. I usually taper each indivdual thin-thick-thin, rather than two lines or more together. This is a personal preference. Feel free to go ahead and play around. However, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to make it look something like this:

05. See? This means at the tip of the hair, it will be thin, rather than thick. It'll look something like THIS:

05b. See? It becomes narrow at the end of both lines. Now all you have to do is follow it through to the end.