Roby Bang

I tend to obsess on how "crisp" an image looks on a drawing. Does the lineart in this picture look sharp enough? If it doesn't, is there any way to fix it?

I've never done it before, but if I had to guess how, I'd probably get the source picture, draw a white part on a new layer for the mask, and use the brush techniques in the tutorial to get the eyes and lips drawn. Then, I'd duplicate the layer with the friend's picture, make it the alpha mask, and the makeup part should form over the face and give it a facepaint look. Displacement and Alpha Mask pluggin: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=24491 Faking Soft Brushes and Burn/Dodge/Blur Tutorial: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=22096

Kirby145 knows what I'm talking about. I tried threshold with not so great results earlier, but after some thought, I realized that the Alias plugin could also be helpful for thinning out the lines, with Feather to make them look less jaggy. I think I'm just going to have to make cleaner lineart and play with the scanner settings and see if that makes anything better.

I'm reading this book on making webcomics, and it mentions using a bitmap mode on scans. Is there any plugins that work like Photoshop's bitmap mode, and if not, what would be the best way to replicate that?

Thanks for the tips/plugins! I had trouble using the drop shadow, so I did something else for the shadows. Does this look right? I plan on using a hand drawn background later, but I just needed something as a placeholder.

Sorry I wasn't clear: 1) I want to know the best way to draw the figures and perhaps shade (I've seen different techniques; I want to know the best way to do it.) 2) I want to know how to improve the background I made. It seems OK, but for some reason, it looks off to me.

For a longest time, I've been doing sprite comics for fun. So I downloaded Paint.net so I could do better speech balloons and special effects. Now, I kind of want to slowly get into hand drawing so I can hopefully make comics with a little cash on the side. Here's my original sketch: So I started on the background and here's what I have: Even though I've seen a few YouTube tutorials and read some online, for the most part, I can't seem to get what I want out of them. Any tips?