How to Draw Clean and Pretty Linework | Anime & Manga (Basics)

1. Intro: Hi, everyone, and welcome to my skill share class on how to draw clean and pretty linework. I'm a completely self taught artist, and drawing has always been my passion, especially drawing cute anime characters. I've been self learning for the last few years, and I've picked up a lot of knowledge regarding the subject, and I'm working on sharing it with the world. One of the most impressive yet difficult subjects I've encountered has always been drawing line work. It's difficult to get clean, beautiful lines. I used to be terrified of line work because mine was always the sloppiest I've ever seen. But I've learned some techniques to really improve any linework and learn faster. In this short class, I'll be showing you simple yet effective ways to improve your linework using digital tools. We'll also be going over ways to make your sketch work for your lines. You can actually use your sketch to make the line work easier. I'll also walk you through a real time demo of creating a very simple line work using a sketch. To keep the scope of this class small, we will not be learning how to draw anatomy, how to draw bodies, or how to draw specifics. Our main focus will be only on digital linework. I recommend checking out my other how to draw anime and manga courses on Skillshare. If you'd like to know more about my process on drawing things such as hair and simple faces. If you're ready, let's start. 2. Materials, Tools, Basics: Let's take a look at some tools that can be used for digital line work. I'm using paint tool side too, but any similar digital drawing software should have similar brushes. My setup is pretty much the default as I did a fresh uninstall and reinstall recently to try to delete everything and force myself to improve faster. The only thing I saved were handful of brush settings and my swatches. That might sound like a really strange thing to do, but it works. And it also makes it a bit easier to show how the default tools or slight edits of them are good enough to create art. I highly recommend paint tools if you don't have your preferred software yet. It's super easy to use super lightweight and can create gorgeous lines for even people who shake as much as I do. In this video, I'll mostly be sharing tips for a Paint Tool si, but they apply to most drawing software. You may need to ask our best friend Google for some help if you can't find the equivalent, and always remember, software isn't the reason why someone is good at drawing. My first hip is the most essential thing that I can think of Stabilize your lines. No matter what pens or brushes you use, this is a digital art godsend. It helps tremendously with getting beautiful lines. In SI, it's called stabilizer, but in other software, it may be named something different, such as smoothing. In SI, you can change it under this drop down here. My recording software wasn't able to capture the drop down itself, but you should see values between zero and S seven. Zero being absolutely no stabilization and S seven being the most intense amount of stabilization possible. Okay. To show you just how powerful this tool is, I will draw a line with the stabilization set to zero. I have a bit of a tremor in my hand and terrible eyesight, so you'll see what my natural lines look like. You'd probably think I was a terrible artist if I didn't show you my secret tricks, and I just uploaded artwork, drawn that poorly. So now, you know, please don't tell anybody how bad I actually am. Friends keep each other's secrets. Now, watch as I steadily improve my lines by increasing the stabilizer setting a little bit at a time. One thing to note is that the S stabilizers in size, slow down your stroke so you can get a more accurate stroke, even when drawing slowly. The higher the number, the more it slows and stabilizes your stroke. For reference, my sketching is set to between 15 and S two, while my line work uses between s2s7. If you don't have hands that shake as much as mine, you likely won't need to maximize your settings like this. Experiment with your settings to see what works for you. Notice how in comparison, my first line seemed almost painful to draw while it becomes smooth and buttery and quick with this one tiny little setting. The next thing I want to talk about is variations in line width. This is another aspect that affects our work regardless of the software or brushes used. This is really controlled by how thick we draw our lines as we're drawing them manually. Having a variety of thick and thin lines in your drawing can make them more appealing to look at. This can be super subtle technique to elevate line work. Here are a few suggestions. Tick lines can be used for things that are closer to the viewers, outlines, where shapes intersect or overlap and implied shadows. Thin lines can be used for things that are further away or less important. Find details such as hair strands and implied light. I'll show you what I mean and how to use this more in depth in the demos. Now onto the tools themselves. There are two main brushes that I've been using for line work inside, and these are the pencil and brush tools. The pencil tool is a more opaque tool used to draft clean lines without much transparency. Well, the brush is a blendy watercolor type tool that gives you beautiful fades for your linework. Brush also doubles up as a shading tool and can be used to draw and paint details freely. There are millions of brushes that can be used, but to keep things simple, I'll be focusing on only these basic brushes. The brushes you choose when you draw your lines are totally personal preference. This also goes for your line width. Some prefer bold thick lines, while others like delicate thin lines that I can't see very well. It's like whether you prefer your potato chips regular or sour cream and onion. If you don't have your own brush set yet, I strongly recommend experimenting until you find your preferred tool set. This tool set can also vary as you progress in your art journey, so don't worry if you feel a little indecisive at times. That being said, something an art teacher on Billy Billy said has always stuck with me. The direct translation was something like bad line work isn't an art style. It's just being a new. So the basics have to be there before the brush style is really an issue. Be sure to marinate on this. And lastly, I want to take a little bit of time to talk about things to avoid in your line work. These are all mistakes that I've made in the past because of inexperience and the grievances of self teaching. Here's some examples of my bad line work from when I was learning by myself in secret from my unsupported family. Let it soak in for a bit. I've seen these same mistakes in a lot of beginners work, and just like me, they probably didn't know any better or were too inexperienced to notice. Perhaps they were aware that something was off, but couldn't quite place their finger on it. To go a little bit more in depth, there are two major issues that I've seen. The first being line work that isn't stabilized, so it's shaky, and the pen pressure wasn't turned on or their tablet or software didn't support the pen pressure. While many professionals choose not to have much line variation in their work, especially in the animation industry, it's really obvious when someone's doing it intentionally versus someone who just doesn't have the foundational skills to always keep that in mind. I used to draw this way without a stabilizer and all of my work looked horrible. This is also an example of how a decent sketch can be ruined super easily by bad line work. All of the effort put into the sketch is pretty much wasted, and the line work almost never comes out as expected. If this is you, make sure your pen pressure is working and that you set yourself up with a little bit of stabilization. Your work will improve tremendously by doing just those two things. Practice using smaller brushes as well. Zoom in if you need to, and start with a size 30 brush and reduce it incrementally. The second issue is line work that isn't smooth and gives off more of a hay look because of the sheer amount of line to us. A lot of beginners make this mistake and they do it regardless of what style they're trying to learn. This one is actually much more common than the first issue these days. I made this mistake myself a few times by trying to emulate a more popular artist back when I first started. In hindsight, I don't think that they really knew what they were doing either, which is why I really encourage you to analyze your references with a much higher level of scrutiny. Luckily, I dropped this bad habit after two drawings and moved on. The problem with these hay lines is that they scream that they lack confidence. They don't require much skill, and they just look like beginner work. To prove this point, I actually did all of these lines with my non dominant hand, and I was still able to technically do the line work, technically. It didn't look good, but I got it done, which is the mentality of a lot of people who create bad drawings. My boyfriend Graham calls this that'll do this because you get to a certain point where you just want to get it done, and so that'll do. It's a dangerous mindset to have, and I consciously have to avoid it myself. If this is you, practice pulling long single lines instead of scratching your way to the end. Note that this probably won't appear to others as having a unique style, but as not being able to draw lines. I'm sorry to be the bringer of tough love, but I've been there before. Pick good references and train hard and you'll be able to draw lines confidently. These hairy lines also make it 100 times more difficult to color later and make using selection tools and paint buckets a nightmare. So keep in mind that you want clean, crisp line work with your shapes and clothes. So I've pretty much said all of my tips and basics and things to avoid that I can say without actually drawing. If this video was a little bit quick, I recommend watching it again or slowing it down a bit. Same with the other videos in this class. I hope that in time, all of it will make a lot more sense when put into practice. In the next videos, I'll do a few demos of how to apply these concepts to actually creating drawings. 3. Sketching for Better Linework: You can take steps to make your line work look good before you even draw your first line. Your sketch, which sets the foundation for your linework, can be improved to make it easier to get clean line. The technique is to build up and refine your sketch more and more before you move on to outlining. The more information your sketch has, the more your linework process becomes more of a relaxed tracing rather than trying to fill in the gaps mentally as you draw. Let's make a few sketches to see it in action. For this, I'm going to be using the top secret tip of using a blue color to sketch instead of using black. Using blue makes you a better anime artist. I'm not sure how this works, but it does. You can make each pass a different color or slightly darker than the one before it to make it easier on your eyes. It's all up to you. First, the loose sketch, my loose sketch might consist of just some foundational shapes to set where the eyes and hair will go. Something like this can be done quickly in less than 2 minutes and is great for warming up or brainstorming ideas. Experts will be able to just take a sketch like this and fill in the blanks as they go. But at any level, making more passes will make it easier to create crisp line work. During this stage, I'm not focused on making anything neat or tidy and just want to get the general feel of the drawing down. I pretty much don't zoom in, and I don't make any slow or careful breast strokes. Any mistakes made here can be pretty easily adjusted and fixed in later passes or even when you're further along in the drawing, so don't be afraid to make an ugly mess of your first pass. For this sketch demo, we'll go for something super simple. We're just drawing an anime girl bus with some long hair and big eyes. I won't even fill in the eyes for the first pass, just so I can demonstrate how it can be refined and fixed later. This is about all that I need for a first pass. The second pass fills in some of the blanks left by the first, such as the facial features. I copy and paste the work layer and lower the opacity and draw the second pass on a separate layer. You can also do this on the same layer, but I wanted my first pass to be a little less visible under the second pass. To create the second pass, just add on to your first pass and layer in details that you didn't include and fix up areas that you think could be better. I'm going to add in the facial features and refine the hair style. In the simplest way that I can explain it, I'm just drawing out some more details. I'm still working with rather quick brush strokes and trying to keep it from taking up too much time. I also have the first pass to rely on as a guideline, so I don't make something too wonky or too off. By making the guidelines in the first pass less visible, I can better focus on making the second pass cleaner. You can add as much detail as you want in this stage. If you plan on doing no more than two passes, adding all of your details here would be beneficial. Even here, mistakes that are made can be fixed or changed later. So don't worry about it looking perfect and just make it better than your first path. You'll notice that when the second pass is done, it would already be much easier to do the line work, since there's a lot more information already drawn. I won't have to think too much about filling the gaps with my mind for things like the facial features as it's already laid out for me. This is a pretty good stage to stop and line, but we can push it even further by making even more refinements through even more passes. Let's do one more pass. This pass is going to solidify the large shapes that I wanted to express, as well as fix some things that I already dislike about the second pass. For example, I don't like the face shape on the second pass and the eyes could be a little bit more stylized, so I'll take note. I'm not married to my sketch at this point, and I try to look at it objectively to see what I can improve on. These are things that can be fixed during the linework stage too. But if you do it before you even get there, it makes it even easier. Like we did before, I'll copy the working layers and I'll lower the opacity of the layers that came before this and use a darker purple color so that I can see it better. If you find it helpful, you can also use different colors for each part of the sketch, such as purple for the hair and red for the eyes or whatever works for you. The process for this is pretty much identical to the second pass. We are working on making this sketch the best it can be before moving on. I'm going to go over most of the brush strokes that I made in the second pass and tighten them up a little bit. I'm actually making fewer brush strokes than before as well. You might also find it helpful to use a smaller brush each time you make a new pass. So give that a try. This pass should be even easier than the last. As I already have not one but two layers of guidelines that I can use to support my drawing. I'll add a few more details very loosely that weren't in the other passes, and I'll fix up the areas that I had noted earlier. The face, which was bothering me after the completion of the second pass was the first to be fixed, and the rest are just little adjustments or additions I think can improve the entire piece. Take your time with these passes and don't be afraid to check yourself and go back to fix things. I love big hair with lots of chunks and sections, so I add that in as well. Each time you were fine, you might find something that you didn't know you wanted in your image before, and this is a good way to discover them. You can basically do this in unlimited amount of times, creating more and more passes until you feel confident that you've created something worth lining, and that will be fairly easy for you to line. Once you've reached that point, simply merge everything and move on to the next step. One thing I want to stress, though, is that you shouldn't feel pressured to be able to do your line work after just one or two passes or be able to create a masterpiece using the bare minimum sketch. If it takes two six or seven layers to create something you feel comfortable with, just do them. You don't need to constrain yourself. The goal is to make your sketch support your line work in the easiest way possible and make your work look the best that it can. One last note that I want everybody to marinate on is that not all sketches are equally viable. That sadly means that not all sketches are worth lining and not all sketches can or should be lined and colored. Be critical of the references you use and how your sketch looks. Take your time analyzing everything and don't try to rush. If your sketches first or second pass isn't really working out for you, don't try to force it to happen. Sometimes it's better to cut your losses and start it again. Two solid sketch passes are better than 17 bad ones. 4. Demo: Simple Headshot: For this demo, we're going to be using the same sketch that we saw in the materials video. It's a fairly simple sketch and it's just a head shot, but it has a few details. I did two passes for the initial sketch, but I got a bit lazy and I did them on the same layer. Either way, it should be clean enough to be able to work with. We will be using regular layers and the regular pencil and brush tools for this demo, so we will be drawing and erasing manually without any other tools. Another thing to note is that if you make a lot of mistakes when drawing, you can simply undo or erase parts. My eraser is always available if I make any mistakes or need to clean up any lines. I also do quite a bit and keep my non dominant hand hovering over control Z. On bad days, I probably do more than I actually draw. To start creating linework, lower the opacity of the image to about 20%. This makes it much easier to see the lines that you're drawing and keeps it from being too messy. I find this percentage fluctuates, but if you can afford to make it even less visible, you definitely should. You can use whatever color you want for linework, but I'll pick a standard flack for simplicity. The color of your linework can also be edited later. The first thing that I'm going to do is line the eyes on their own layer. I don't know when I picked up this habit, but I've been doing it for a little while. I've also seen artists completely separate the lines of every part of their character, but I'm too lazy for that. Up until now, I haven't really zoomed in on the images I've shown you, but as you do the line work, you might find that you need to get in for a closer look. Using the pencil tool, I'll go and draw the lines around my character's eyes. I start off with a brush size that I know I'm comfortable using, which is size 12. Should always start off with the size that you're comfortable with and then adjust it accordingly. Some parts of my line work are already getting a bit messy and imperfect. So I make sure to clean it up with a race your tool as I go. Make sure you put a lot of care and attention to detail on places such as the eyes as those are the things that will draw the viewers attention. For the most part, I draw both eyes manually, and I don't really support drawing just one and flipping it horizontally. I find that drawing them both from scratch gives it a more organic look and I get to practice drawing the other eye too. I will outline the second eye in the same way as the first eye. Trying my best to make sure that they look like a matching pair and the shapes aren't too different from each other. Things like bottom eyelashes, eyelids, and small details can be added once the main outline is done. I struggled a little bit with the placement of eyelashes on the second eye, so I made sure to go back and fix the issues before I moved on. I'll add the smaller details of the eyes only when the outline is done. At this stage, I'm still erasing and editing a lot of my line work. When I feel like these outlines are mostly done, I'll flip the canvas horizontally to make sure it doesn't look too wonky the other way. This is a great way to check your work for mistakes as our eyes get used to looking at our work and start to ignore things that don't look quite right. If you flip the canvas, you can get a new perspective on your piece. Flipping the canvas is completely optional. I do think it helps quite a bit. It's always better to catch these things yourself, rather than someone else pointing them out to you, especially strangers on the Internet who are just out to be nasty if you post your work online. After I flipped horizontally, I immediately noticed that one of her eyelashes look strange to me, and I hadn't noticed that before. I made sure to go ahead and re it. This is one of the benefits of being able to find mistakes in your work. It also helps if you have someone that you can show for an honest opinion. For the irises, I felt that the pencil tools lines were a bit too harsh and too opaque. I switched to the brush tool. I wanted a slightly softer feel so the brush felt like a better choice. My first attempt wasn't so great, so I di it and tried again. After my second attempt, I decided to flip the canvas and see if I could drop better viewing it from the flip side. This is a good technique to use if you can't seem to get something right. For detailed things such as eyes, it's very effective at showing you your flaws while also giving you a way to fix them. After I added the pupils, I had to just the eyelashes again slightly. It may seem like I'm spending a lot of time on just the eyes, but I'm actually learning and reinforcing my knowledge at the same time. It's always better to be slower and constantly learning, rather than fast and turning out the same low quality piece but with a different hairstyle every day. I also spend a lot of time on these eyes because I don't plan on altering them much further or coming back to fix them later. So I'd like them to be finished by the time and move on. Her right eye looks a little bit wonky to me, so I'll use the transform tool to make it slightly taller. Be careful how much you use the transform tool during line work and make sure you only use it sparingly. Using it too much can result in your lines looking blurry. I'll do one last horizontal flip for quality control, and then those eyes are done. Once the frames of the eyes are done, I'll create a new layer underneath it and select the eyelash area. I then fill this area in with a very dark gray. If there are any gaps, I'll make sure to go back and fill those in. This makes it easier to look at the eyelashes and it starts bringing the eyes to life. Next, I turn the sketch layer off completely to check my work and fix bits that are bit wonky or could look better. At the stake, if they look good without the sketch and just on their own, then this is a good start. I'll it any small areas that could be improved on and I move on. I turn the sketch back on so I can keep working on the piece as a whole. If you don't want to toggle the sketch layer on and off, you can skip it. I'd just like to see how things look without the sketch getting in the way. I'll add in a small highlight to the eyes as a final touch. Then I'll leave the eyes alone from now on. When the eyes are complete, create a new layer underneath the eye layers for the rest of the line work. Again, you can actually separate all the parts of your drawing into separate layers, but I'm only going to use two, one for the eyes and one for everything else. You could also do everything on one layer. I'd like to do the rest of the line starting with the jaw line. I'll attempt to draw the jaw in as few brush strokes as possible to keep it soft and smooth looking. If you're drawing a male, you can make your lines more sharp and angular. You'll notice I undo quite a bit here, and that's because one good breast stroke is better than three bad ones, and I don't want to move on unless it's good. If at any point you feel as though you've drawn your lines too thick, you can use the eraser tool to thin them out manually. After I drew the neck, I thought that the lines were a bit too thick, so I erased and cleaned them up slightly. This type of technique is completely optional and it all depends on personal preference, but I want my lines thick enough so that my poor eyesight can see them, but thin enough so that they look somewhat professional. I'm a bit stubborn, so I'll fix this before moving on. Once the jaw line is done, I will add in the rest of the facial features, and then I'll work on outlining all of the larger shapes using the same pencil tool. This includes the shape of the head and the hair and basically the entire outline of the character. I'm using the same kind of brushes that I used for the eyes, somewhere in between size six and size 12. I try to get most of the curves in one or two brush strokes, and I do anything that doesn't work. At this point, I found my hand was shaking quite a bit, so I turned the stabilizer up to S five to get the beautiful curves. You can try various line work techniques, such as working your way out from the inside or doing all of the outside lines first. But whatever works for you. Personally, I seem to just do whatever I want, and I don't really have much of a process there. It all really depends on the mood that day that I'm drawing. For this one, I decide to do the top of the head, followed by the bangs. The order of drawing lines doesn't really matter, but if it helps you, you can do certain parts first or create your own order. Something to note when doing line work is that even though getting the sketch to this point didn't take a tremendous amount of time, the line work phase can be a real time sync. It can take a lot longer than you envision, and you might feel frustrated at the time lost, especially if you're want to get caught in the small details. Just remember that it's all about the learning process. There have been times where my sketch took me less than 10 minutes, but the line work just wasn't working out after hours of struggle. It's not uncommon to accidentally spend three or 4 hours just trying to get the lines done. And honestly, one of the reasons I avoided it so much when I first started is because I felt that since it always took me so long and my results were still lack luster, perhaps I just wasn't cut out for it. What's the point in spending my entire night on one crappy drawing when the lines won't even come out right? I would admire the line work of professional Japanese Manga artists and just wonder why I couldn't achieve the same result. I almost stopped doing line work altogether. Luckily, I'm smarter than that, and I did a lot more research and practice a lot more until I got over it. I got to a point where even in my downtime, I was always analyzing and researching ways to improve and that way I could really maximize my improvement. Turns out, I just didn't have enough patience. So if you're like me, you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the desire to draw clean lines. As an outsider looking in, people will always be impressed by your ability to draw clean lines and wonder what your secret is. In this case, I've also shared all of my top secrets that nobody else should ever know, so there will be no excuses tolerated from here on out. As I start to line the pigtails, I realized that I probably would have really benefited from a third sketch pass. I was getting harder and harder to draw clean and convincing lines over the sketch that I had made. If I had drawn in the smaller details a little better on a sketch layer, it would have been a lot easier to outline because I wouldn't have to think about it as much. But that wasn't the case. So for the sake of time, I'll just move on and fill in the gaps while doing the line work. It isn't necessarily bad to do this, but it could have been easier and faster. I also want to note that I did this outline with the same brush size throughout. For this outline, I didn't feel the need to adjust because I just wanted to get a clean and smooth outline. I'll fix up some of these areas later, by definitely, we'll add more details to it. For now, I'm just doing the bare minimum. If you like, you can also make the outside lines of your character extra. I sometimes do this perfect and it works really well if you're drawing stickers. Okay. You'll notice I'm still flipping the canvas quite frequently when I'm doing the line work. When I'm drawing by myself, I'll often flip the canvas even more. But for videos and streams, I try to keep it to a minimum, so I don't annoy people. If you want to test how this could possibly be so effective, I encourage you to flip your own work and other people's work to see the difference. At this point, I've gotten all the large shapes down and it's basically an outline of the sketch. The basic shapes alone don't always look very pretty, but they set the foundation for adding more details to the linework. I turn off the sketch layer so that I can improve on the lines that are already there. Once the outline looks okay, then I'll start adding the finer details. I'll draw in her eyebrows on the same layer that I did her eyes. Depending on your style and your goals, sometimes the stage of line work is more than enough to begin coloring. We have our shapes and outlines, and nothing is too wonky, and the lines are mostly enclosed. There should be no issues using a selection tool or paint bucket to apply color to something that looks like this. Since I recently discovered how much I actually enjoy drawing lines, I want to add some fine details to the line work, some of which weren't in my original lazy sketch. For my finer details, I switched to my brush tool instead of the pencil so that the lines aren't as harsh or as opaque. The brush size remains around the same size as the pencil tool, and I'm controlling the brush stroke with all of the motor skills that I have while relying on the amazing stabilizers. I'll be drawing all of my details on the same line work layer, but you can also draw them on a separate layer if you want to preserve the lines that you've already drawn. This keeps them from getting ruined if you make too many mistakes. When you draw the fine details, make sure you aren't drawing things half hazardly. Use the lines to your bandage. For example, I'll be adding some thin buttery lines to the hair to make it seem soft and girly, and her monthly budget for shampoo and conditioner is more than I make at my day job. A way that something like this could go horribly wrong is if I start laying in these lines half hazardly with the mindset, the more is better, and I add too many. Things like that can easily ruin everything you've done up to this point. Instead of flowy soft hair, you could end up with what looks like a bird dropped its twigs on her head. Always be critical of yourself as you work through your drawings. If you aren't sure how to add details or where to add them, it'll all come with time practice and research. You can watch videos, look at reference images, or experiment until you find something that makes sense, but always be critical of everything you see and everything you do. One very important thing to note is that you don't have to fill every centimeter of space with fine lines and details. Leave enough space for things to breathe as too many details can make an image feel very claustrophobic. You can see what I mean in a lot of beginner's work and overdesigned characters where way too many things are added, and it just feels more crowded than impressive. When I feel like I'm close to being completely done with the line work, I will turn off my sketch layer for the last time and work on the lines that I have without the sketch. This may seem a little bit uncomfortable, especially for beginners, but it trains your eyes to be able to fill in blanks, as well as refreshes your mind by removing the stuff behind the lines. You may see places that you need to erase or things you miss completely. You might see huge gaps that you need to fill in or details that don't make sense. This is a great opportunity to address those issues before moving on. As a beginner, I often skipped this step, deleted my sketch, and moved on without thoroughly checking it for flaws. I suppose because I was so inexperienced, I wasn't aware that I would be fighting any flaws in my work or I didn't have the skill required to really notice, or a lot of the time I was following tutorials that now in hindsight were not very good resources for beginners. Always check your work before moving on and you can increase the quality of your work easily. Here's another interesting thing you can do if you've brought your drawing up to this point, but you still feel like it's lacking or you aren't confident with it yet. Merge all of your layers together and lower the opacity. Treat your not good enough line work as a sketch pass and go over it again and fix it. This is something that I didn't have the patients for before. But I've done this a few times recently and the results were much better than what they would have been. At this stage, I would consider my line work mostly complete, with the exception of just a few more adjustments that need to be made. Even at this stage of drawing, perhaps, especially at this stage of drawing, I'm constantly cleaning up my lines with the eraser tool. Some small disconnects or issues are fine to leave as is. Since the image will probably be looked at in a much more med out size, I do this cleanup to better my own skills, and I recommend that you consider doing it too. This is part of the reason why my line work so long, but I've come to learn that time spent isn't time wasted. To make my lines look a little bit better, I darken these sharp corners in between the characters banks. You can use this technique for any corner like this to emphasize your lines there a little bit. You can use the same technique to thicken any lines that you've already drawn. If you use lines with very little weight variations, you can use this to quickly elevate your work. Alternatively, you can use your eraser to thin out some lines that were drawn too thick as well. I'm always less concerned about my line work being thin and more concerned about it being smooth and somewhat clean and not looking like it's full of mistakes. This is a comfortable width for me, so this is why I typically use. My biggest tip for getting your line work to be thinner is to trace sketches with thinner passes. I started off with extremely thick lines, which I really hated, and I had to work my way down. I started using size 40 brushes, then gradually lowered the size to about size ten or 12. For reference, my canvas size is A four at around 300 DPI. I'll do a few final edits to the character zooming out. We've been looking at this character in a very zoomed in distance, so it's good to zoom out and take a look at it as a whole. I'll make just a few simple adjustments to the back of her head, and then I consider the line work complete. Once I finish my line work, I don't tend to go back to change it any further, so this is what it'll be forever. I feel it's more efficient to complete each step in one go instead of having to come back later. For comparison, I just want to show you the difference between the line work we just made versus a terrible linework that I showed you earlier. Both of the bad examples were mistakes that had made in the past. But this one that we've done together shows how far you can come without too much hassle and a little patience. I feel as though I can improve my linework even further, which is a good sign of recognizing improvement. Take all of this as somewhat of a basic building block. Learning to draw clean lines or draftsmanship, as they call it is a pretty basic skill and can even cover up some of the other gaps you may have in your knowledge. From here, you can alter your lines to have textures, colors, or other effects, and you can really build up your own style. I hope that you'll try out some of the top secret info I've shared and use it to improve your own work. 5. Class Project: I hope you found this class insightful and learned something new. I hope that my work can inspire you to create your own and encourage you to continue learning and expanding your own horizons. The class project for this class has two parts. The first being the creation of a sketch. Use the method of creating more than one pass to create a sketch that looks better after each layer. The second part is actually creating your linework. You can use the sketch that you made in the previous step. If you don't want to create your own sketch, I'll provide the ones I used for this class and you can try using mine. It's all up to you. I recommend creating at least three sets of linework. Use the first to get into the habit of creating linework, the second to familiarize yourself with possible tool set, and a third to reinforce everything you've learned so far. If you enjoy this class, please share it with your friends, post your own artwork and mese high on social media. I look forward to seeing your work.