'Spirit Painter' collaboration, possibly more

[na_th_an]

Yep... And if I was comfortable with vector I would've traced the sketch to get cleaner lines. I might have a go at that on the next peice I color.

I don't know how to do vectors (but I'm learning Illustrator in a while, 'cause I've expermented with this style which I like but it's a hell to do in Photoshop), but I have atrick to produce clean outlines.

The trick involves the use of Macromedia Flash. I use version 5, some learning stuff I got from a cover mag, so I guess anything fits

The trick consists on taking your hand-inked drawing and scanning it in black and white (this is: 1 bit per pixel) at 300 dpi or more. Save it as a GIF. The open Flash and create a doc that's the size of your GIF file. Import the GIF file, and select "Trace bitmap image" or something like that (I got a Spanish version, heh), which is in a menu (Transform or Modify should be, I guess). This will turn your bitmap into vectors. Play with the settings. Adjust: Normal and minimum area = 8 pixels should work okay, but find yours.

Once finished you can export the current frame to PNG and load it in Photoshop

This doesn't produce great results, but most of the time it removes jitter in the inked image. Try to colour the vectorized-rasterized image and then resize it to be smaller: it will rock.

Look at this picture: the lines look smooooooth. And the whole page was finished in like 15 minutes, so trust me: it works This one looks also smooth. The originals were small and looked like rubbish when scanned. Now it looks like CG in some frames.