LeoArtz

Actually there are many ways how you can sketch digitally and I’m still discovering new methods and tools.

For the sketching the ideal tool is your good old wooden or brand new mechanical pencils.  They are fast, flexible, light and so on. Oh and you have a very precise control over your tools behavior. That’s the most important thing actually! Digital tools are fun but sometimes unpedictable or hard to control. The only problem with analog pencils is when you scan them into computer and your lines looks messy. Sometimes it’s not a problem if you need only guidelines for the painting (you’ll cover them with paint after all) but for the comic or manga style you need sharp and crisp lines.

You may try a sharp pencil and heavy paper, or inking, like tons of comic artists do, but I sometimes prefer to do a digital pass over the scanned drawing.  And the best tool for that is Painter. For years I’ve been sketching with… well, digital pencils, located under the Pencils brush tab. However pencil lines aren’t sharp in terms of edge quality:

The edge looks a bit blurry and if you zoom in you’ll notice that your lines aren’t solid. So I tried some other brushes and switched to Smooth Round Pen:

That brush have good solid lines with sharp edges but sometimes it’s generating random blobs at the start and/or end of the line.

About a week ago I discovered a new brush called Scratchboard Tool located at the same Pens group. The results seems to be much nicer with no blobs at all.

A few more quick tricks and here we go… your elven music CD mockup: