Inkscape thoughts

Some interesting points about Inkscape have come to light whilst I've been testing today...

• Pressure sensitive tablets can have unusual affects. Whilst redoing "Crash", I decided to try some thicker lines using the tablet, only to find that although I did get thicker lines, the ends of the lines were untidy, compared to normal (almost as if the caps were having extra nodes put in place). For inking purposes, this is annoying - I'd rather have a smooth smart line than a thickening line that had messy ends. For the majority of inking then, it's better to turn off the pressure sensitivity for the calligraphy tool, and rely on the "thinning" parameters, or tweak the paths later...
• The above is especially noticeable inking circles!

Inkscape Inking Test

As promised, here is the Inkscape inking comparison. I created a cartoon of Teeah & Crash just for this. Here is the Inkscape version...
And here is the hand inked version (ignore the pencil lines of the dialog in this one...)

An interesting experiment, and here are my findings....

• The initial sketch and ink drawing took an hour - the Inkscape inks took 45 mins, so both methods are comparable.
• The shading in the Inkscape drawing is not at subtle - You can't get the really thin strokes you need for this in Inkscape.
• The Inkscape drawing is good, but it lacks a bit of character. The drawing can appear "heavy handed".
• The Ink drawing seems "punchier" - this could just be that the outline is thicker.
• The Ink drawing has more character - is this because it has more "neuances" that just don't exist in the Inkscape version?

I think at present, I'll stick with manual inking, although I need a better "white-out" system... :)

UPDATE:
Here is another Inkscape version - I've changed a couple of things, most notably by using thinning lines with the calligraphy pen, as well as thickening lines. I've also changed the shading by using the tweak tool to roughen, and then shrink the paths. I think it looks better :)

Inkscape Test....

No, this is not deja vu, but you have seen this image before. This lunchtime, I wanted to se just how good Inkscape was at inking using default settings. I've used a previous picture of Crash & Teeah as the basis, but I've just used the Calligraphy Pen with default thinning settings for the inking - no thickening with the tweak tool as yet.

All in all, it took about 45 minutes - not too shabby. The pen widths here are mainly 2, with 1 for fine lines, but I may have to ink at higher resolutions with thicker lines, as these widths seem hard to control (perhaps 3 with 1...)

I have to remind myself here, that the initial drawing was not brilliant! The comparison of the inks however, looks promising...

UPDATE: The thinning option can be made negative, which means if you go faster you get thicker lines - could I just have found inking nervana?

The Boxer

Just a quick cartoon - not a gag cartoon this time, but more of an attempt to draw a particular character. When deciding on my lunchtime cartoons, I sometimes use a randomizer to give me ideas - this time, the randomizer came up with a boxer - hence the picture. I'm a lot happier with this cartoon than the previous one, as the colours come across better. I'm buying myself some more markers today, so we'll see how these work on Monday...

The diver

My latest cartoon - again coloured using the Peter Cocker technique - note to self, wet the paper especially for the background. For reference, here is the before and after versions :)

I'll have to remember that my "subtle" colouring can get lost in the scanning process - you can't see it here, but there are shadows underneath the protagonists!

Da name is Bull...

More work with my markers, and some new calligraphy pens - I really need to move to card though, as this paper crinkles!