I’m often asked if my traditional drawings are digital, especially when it comes to my line art with ink. Having clean lines is something that I have worked on purpose, not an innate talent I was born with. So, today I’m sharing with you the things I do to give my drawings that clean look.
I learned some of these tips from different artists, including tattoo artist and illustrator Fer Solley, who explained to me the importance of clean steady lines for tattoo design and tattooing.
1. Practice
The most important part is having good lines in the first place, and for that you need practice; but, where to start? There are a couple of exercises that made the difference for me, the first one was tracing Vector Art and the other one was drawing parallel lines.
Tracing Vector art
Look for free vector art in black and white (there’s plenty of free options in this page). Make sure to pick a wide variety of art, big and small, that includes thick and thin lines, black fillings, straight lines, and curves. In a program like photoshop lower their opacity to 10-20% and print them out.
Grab your inking tools. I use fine liner technical pens ranging from 0.005 to 1.2 mm for lines, and an ink pen brush for fillings. Now carefully ink directly into the printed sheet, trying to be as precise as the original graphic.
You could spend as much time as you like doing this exercise, but what worked for me was just 10 minutes every day for 6 months.
Drawing Parallel lines
This exercise is more loose and fun. Just draw some elements inside a rectangle, they can be anything from stars, flowers, or circles. Then draw parallel lines surrounding their border, like ripples, one line at a time by element. Keep making lines until they meet with a nearby borderline, and now draw continuous lines. The point is to try to keep the lines with an equal separation and a steady stroke. Again you don’t need to spend too much time on this, it could be a 10 minutes warm-up before your drawings sessions.
I did mas-o-menos here, but it looks cool. You can also do it with color ink for extra fun.
These are the exercises that helped my inking style, but depending on the type of elements you like to include in your art you could try others. I like to do parallel lines in my character’s hair, as well as hatching for shadows. So it makes sense that I spend more time practicing parallel lines than the time I spend practicing stippling for example. I also like to make lines with a consistent weight so it makes sense to practice using fine liners. If you’re more into lines with variable weight is better to work with a brush pen.
2. Sketching lightly
When making your sketch try to keep your lines light and soft, don’t push too hard on the paper. I still struggle with this, but using a hard lead pencil, like a 2H, helps with keeping the lines light. This allows for any unwanted line to be easily erased once you finish inking your drawing.
Quick sketch done with a 6B lead pencil, low pressure.
Sketch done with a 2H lead pencil, medium pressure.
3. Using tools
You can aid yourself with a drawing compass and rulers to achieve clean lines. I personally only use them for the sketch, as I still need and want to keep practicing my circles and straight lines, but there’s nothing wrong with using them with your ink liners if you’d like📐.
4. Starting and finishing lines in intersections
Think of drawing a triangle: it makes more sense to start at a vertex rather than at a midsection. When we lay our pen down it tends to make a heavier dot, and when we put the pen up sometimes a little strand of ink is lifted. These small marks can look like mistakes, so it is better to keep them hidden in the vertex of shapes or in the intersections of two lines.
The green marks the points where your lines should start and end. The crosses mark the places where it would be a bad idea to start a line.
5. Correcting wobbly lines with a finer pen
Sometimes lines get wobbly; it happens to me when I drink too much coffee. When a line goes wrong, instead of trying to fix it with the same pen, I use a finer one to correct the line carefully. There’s a bigger chance of making the mistake more obvious if use the same pen, as I’m more likely to lay it down at the wrong place😬.
6. Testing the ink and paper
Always make sure the paper you use is friendly with your inks. If it is too absorbent no matter how good your lines are they’re going to look a little hairy (I think ink feathering is the proper way of calling this). If it’s not absorbent enough, the ink will sit on top and you could accidentally run your hand over it and stain the drawing; even worse if it happens when you’re erasing. Sometimes the culprit is a slow drying ink, so always test your material if it is your first time trying them. If you’re in doubt about where to start, here’s a great list of materials recommended by Illustrator Jake Parker for the Inktober Challenge.
Pro Tip: Even if your paper and ink are great it is good practice to draw and ink starting from the top-left, ending at the bottom-right; or from top and right, ending at the bottom left, if you’re left-handed.
7. Scanning and color correction
I always scan my drawings to make the blacks look black and the whites look white. I also remove the paper texture and any pencil mark that I didn’t erase. You can watch my process on how I digitalize ink and watercolor in this video tutorial:
Now that you know how I do it you may ask yourself: “but, why?”
I’m faster doing traditional line art than digital line art 😅 and having good lines also helps me save time when vectorizing my art for enlargement and prints. Most of the time I just have to use the trace image tool in Adobe Illustrator, and the automatically generated vector is good to go.
I’m also interested in becoming a tattoo artist in the future, so having a good steady line is important to me and most importantly to the style I like.
Making *almost* perfect circles and straight lines is not everyone’s piece of cake, and there are plenty of amazing artists whose line art style is made of wobbly lines.
I think the most important thing is to work towards the things you love. If it happens to be making clean steady lines I hope these tips are helpful to you. Happy lines✌️
Do you like my content? Support me on Ko-fi 🙂