Animation Day 2; inking, animating, etc

Yesterday was mostly side tracked with "how best to ink drawings" in Illustrator so that I can import them in to Toon Boom Studio (TBS).

Well, the time crunch is a factor here and I realize I'm not the most experienced artist, or have a very steady hand/arm to do this stuff... so I think I'm going to fall back to consistent line width and using the pen tool to ink everything.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for using a tablet and going that way, but for this project, I don't have enough time to get really good enough to make it "good" looking.

The obvious issue here is that I can't really do good line art in TBS itself without getting TB Harmony or something crazy... or using the eraser tool and getting all obsessive over how my lines aren't lining up, being overshot, can't zoom in far enough to round things out good enough, etc... hence why we're starting out with Illustrator in the first place.

I have the power to line up my vector art accurately and consistently.  I can mess with strokes and utilize all of the tools Illustrator gives me.  This in and of itself was a challenge to learn and get used to, but at the end of the day, I decided to use strokes (instead of fills with the blob tool) to ink everything.

On the note of coloring, this will likely be an after thought, but I've done some small pet projects to see how it works so I don't accidentally shoot myself in the foot if I can go down this road some day.  After some experimenting, the "easy" coloring option was to use Live Paint, but this was its own issue when importing to TBS (it left weird lines around the edges of the painted areas)... so Live Paint was out.  I ended up resorting to making a layer under the line art, using big blob tool to paint in areas, then cleaning up the overflows with some pathfinder magic and using copies of line art to "clip" away the excess.

This definitely isn't the only way to do it and I'm sure there is a better way out there, but again, more time and ambition will lead to me finding these options.

It is today's hope that I will finish up the first 4 or 5 storyboard cards for my animation project in TBS.  With that said, Animate day 2, begin!

I don't know yet if I'll be posting my work as I get it done on the blog or not.

Line drawing in Illustrator

This took me a while to figure out the "best way" to do... but I eventually stumbled on to this blog:

http://danidraws.com/2007/01/08/creating-line-drawings-in-adobe-illustrator/

Good stuff.

Basically...

1) Take your hand drawn sketch, scan it in
2) Place it on a new Illustrator document
3) Turn it to a template
4) Make a new layer (this will be the inking layer)
5) Use brushes and a drawing tablet to "ink" the lines, don't worry about over-shooting lines
6) Use pen tool to add anchor points where lines intersect and overshoot each other
7) Use direct select tool to delete the overhanging parts

This is very useful because importing vector art in to Toon Boom Studio is how we're doing things on our end.  Drawing in TBS is nice, but really awkward correcting my line art.

Oh, and if you don't know how to import AI files in to TBS, you have to save your Illustrator art as CS2 format otherwise TBS can't read the data.  This information is current as of TBS version 7.1