The most important thing to stress is to lock off the background and create a separate lines layer (or sketch layer, that you'll later turn off, if you need it). I don't resize these brushes, just switch between the 4 presents as needed. When I'm working with line art, I don't use any of the preset brushes (other than the hard eraser, resizing as needed) but instead work with a set of four custom brushes all of which have fixed opacity and variable width - the minimum and maximum widths vary from 1 pixel with low pressure and 2.5 pixels with high pressure on the smallest brush, up to 2.2 on low pressure and 7.2 on high pressure. Once I'm working with a colour that's already on screen, I always start by colour-selecting the closest colour then adjusting it slightly. I colour 'by eye', choosing a colour from the colour wheel, then from the triangular darkness/saturation selector. I eventually 'zoom in' with the resize tool to work on the finer details, like, say, an eye.

Once I've drawn what I want at that blurry resolution, I gradually reduce the size of the airbrush and draw with increasingly higher levels of detail. My digital paintings are drawn entirely with the airbrush tool (and soft eraser) - I use the resize brush tool (shown on the middle right here) to make the airbrush large and start to draw a 'blurry' sketch. The background is opaque and the other layers transparent - again, it's easier to change your mind draw a background under the image when you've started with a transparent background rather than solid white. If you've only got one screen and you're working off a digital reference image, resize the window to allow the reference image to appear on one side of the screen and put the tool and colour selectors underneath it.Įven if you're only working on one layer, lock off the background and create a new layer to work on. Open the dialogs for Layers, Tools, Colours and the Resize Brush Tool and position them on screen. It's easy enough to scale down later if you need it, but very difficult to add details when you've started at a low resolution! I've been asked how I produce my realistic art and comic book style art with smooth solid lines, as I use some customisations, so I thought it might be helpful to produce this basic tutorial for using SketchBook Pro for my style of digital art.įirst of all, I work at the maximum resolution (Image Size) possible so if it ever needs to be used in print, the detail's there. I use a tablet PC (where I draw directly on the screen) and find SketchBook Pro by far the most intuitive art package for pen use - all the tools like cut, resize, rotate, move, scale etc are all intuitively pen driven. I produce all my digital art using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2010 (and I used older versions of the same program back to Alias SketchBook Pro 2).

Autodesk sketchbook pro 2010 trial