Second of three Baldo drawing videos on YouTube

Comments ⁴

1. Ted Slampyak

   Okay, Carlos, now you’ve done it. You’ve made your second video so fascinating, so instructive, that I’m forced to eat my words from last week. That was great!

   Do you really do your inking in Illustrator? I never would have thought of using Illustrator for inking work. I guess you use those custom brush strokes for the line work? I’m still just blown away by that — illustrator?!?

   Nice job, Carlos!

   (…Illustrator?!?…)

2. Danny Burleson

   Oh yeah, Illustrator is great for inking, to a certain degree. Sometimes it over corrects depending on your auto-correct settings (you can turn them off, but for me, it looks funny, probably cause I actually suck at drawing), but you can resize your work and not have it get all ‘pixely’.

   Before I got a Wacomâ?¢, I would scan my line art in and process it into vectors via Illustrator (a process which was deemed strange by some folks over at ToonTalk), which made my line art look better than I really drew it, lol, but I could make it as big or as small as I needed it to be before taking it into Photoshop for coloring (heck, you could color directly in Illustrator, but that’s a major pain.)

   Ironically, now that I have a Wacom and could use Illustrator directly, I’m doing 100% of my work in Photoshop.

3. Alan Gardner  (admin)

   The thought of “inking” in Illustrator had never occurred to me, so I had to bust it out and try it and low and behold – it works just fine (as if Carlos’ work wasn’t convincing enough).

   As of Illustrator CS 2 there is an option to convert raster art into vector art using the Live Trace feature. I did that earlier this year for a freelance project. I inked the art the old school way with pen and ink, then scanned it in to the computer, pulled it into Illustrator and clicked the Live Trace button. From then on, I had a completely scalable drawing. I ended up doing the color work in illustrator to maintain the scalability but was cursing the whole way through that part.

4. Carlos Castellanos

   Hi Guys, glad to see the clip has expanded your horizons a tad. Frankly, I don’t work in illustrator much. 90% of the time I do my line work in PH. I use Illustrator when I want a cleaner line with a bit smoother flow. Otherwise I typically use PH because it’s a bit looser and the line work retains more of the natural feel.

   A quick breakdown of the process I use:
   I start by placing my sketch into a new Illustrator document (File >Place. Git your sketch . Before you click OK, make sure the â??Templateâ? box is checked. This will place your sketch on its own layer and automatically lock and reduce transparency to 50%. You’re set to go.

   I typically just use a series of different sized basic round brushes with width determined by the pen pressure (double-click brush in brush palette to access those settings). To set up your brushes, you may want start by modifying your brush by double-clicking on the brush tool. The Paintbrush Tool Preferences window opens.
   The settings I use are: Fidelity-3, Smoothness-10, “Edit selected Path” is checked, and within “12” pixels is selected.

   These controls set how much Illustrator smoothes out you’re lines. I like to keep smoothing down to a minimum. Play with it and see what works for you.

   Sorry for the long winded post. I hope it’s helpful.

   Cheers,
   C-