Full transcript of “How to skip lineart if you dont like doing it”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 Hello, I'm Blue. And I hate doing line art. So, today I'm going to show you how to skip it. To me, the sketch always looks better and the line art always looks so lifeless and flat. I am just not good at it, I think. So, I've been skipping it since forever and this is why my pieces look like this. If you're anything like me, I will show you how to do it. Line art is not necessary to make art, but I think it's kind of the first thing that you learn that is necessary. So, you normally learn to sketch, then line art, base color, shading, rendering. That's a very normal sequence to like doing art. I think that's what everybody learns first. But you can skip it if you want because learning good line art is a skill on its own and can be kind of tricky, especially if you're new to art. You've probably noticed that the sketch can look better than the line art and here's why that is.
0:45 With the first sketch, you aren't a tunnel visioned into making things look perfect. The initial sketch has more flow, shape, and long strokes. There's not a lot of pressure that goes into making the first initial sketch look perfect because you know you're going to like change it up with line art later. So, there's a lot of natural flow to a sketch and there's also a lot more mistakes to the initial sketch because you're not trying to make things look perfect. But then you go straight into line art, but this sketch here is not a good base to work with. Because when you're doing line art, you're trying to show a shape on a 2D object, but that's hard to do when the shape you're drawing isn't well defined, making the line art look flat or making the line art process a lot harder than what it should be. So, there are two things that you need to make line art work. It's good flow and a good base to work on. But if you hate line art, you can simply skip it by
1:31 cleaning up the sketch and rendering on top of the art afterwards. Before we get started, I'm happy to announce this video is brought to you by Skillshare. It's the best place for humans learn from other humans with thousands of classes taught by world-class creatives, from photography, arts, to business, to self-care, and so much more. Lately, I've been neglecting my iPad a bit. I've been so focused on my work that I haven't really let myself creatively explore. So, I decided to take a class recommended by the Skillshare team, Kickstart Your Creativity with Procreate Play 20 Fun Drawings for Beginners and Beyond. Now, I'm not a beginner, but I would never really took a dedicated class on simple drawings before. The teacher, Lisa, has such a charming way of teaching. She leads you through how Procreate works, links some brushes, and then she creates these really cute illustrations step-by-step for beginners. I actually had a lot of fun
2:17 turning off my brain and following along. She even has this adorable palette where you can collect all your art pieces as you go. I think it's really cute and I had the best time just being creative without the pressure. If you've never tried these kind of classes before or maybe if you're a beginner trying to learn Procreate, I would definitely suggest this class. I'll have a link down below. If you're interested in switching out doomscrolling for learning or even stress-free learning like Lisa's class, there are thousands of options on Skillshare. The first 500 people to use my link in the description or scan this neat QR code on screen will get a 1-month free trial. So, there really isn't anything to lose. Thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this video and thank you to you for interacting with my content so people like Skillshare will continue to work with me. I really appreciate it. Now onto the video. I have a very messy style, so the line art
3:02 that I do at the end when I'm rendering and I'm cleaning it up looks like this. But if you really want a clean line art style, you can still do this process that I'm going to show you. It'll look something like this. It just takes a little bit longer, but you can skip line art and still do art like this. So, how do we do this? First, you need to clean up the sketch. To make this easier and faster, have your brush and eraser easy to switch between. Just have them easily accessible on a shortcut or if you're on like an iPad or tablet, just somewhere in the gestures that are easy to like switch between the brush and the eraser. Make sure the brush you're using has some transparency to it, so it's not a solid brush like this. I prefer like a brush like this one, maybe a airbrush, or just a very light fluffy brush. I find this a lot easier to sketch with
3:48 cuz my brain isn't thinking too hard on the shapes. It's more just thinking about like the overall silhouette of the drawing that I'm doing. But that just works for me. Whatever works for you. The idea is to start off with a really thick brush and then work your way smaller and smaller as you start cleaning up until the lines are the desired shape that you want them to be. So, for the original sketch, it'll look something like this. There's a lot of blurry shapes and stuff, but because I'm the artist, I know what's going on. And I'm sure if you drew something like this, you would know what's going on here, too. This is great for laying out like basic shapes, basic planning. It's just really simple lines. This is also very stress-free. So then, once this initial sketch is done, I will copy paste this sketch into a new layer, so then I have two of the sketches. And
4:35 the bottom one, I will like lower down the opacity down to like three or four or five, just so I can barely see it in the background. If you're using Clip Studio Paint, you can just drag the layer icon up to like the new layer icon and it'll copy paste it for you. I keep the copies because sometimes when I change something, I realize I preferred the previous rendition of the sketch, so I can just go back and add it back in. So, let's say I like this eye better from like two sketches ago, I still have a copy of that. So, I can just go in, copy paste that into the sketch I'm cleaning up now and I have the eye back. Then I start cleaning up the sketch that I have on full opacity and make my brush and eraser a little bit smaller than what it was and I start cleaning up very lightly. I try not to zoom into the sketch and I try and keep the the sketch a bit
5:21 smaller on the screen, so I'm not too hyper-focused on the details. Basically, I'm taking the eraser and I'm just like cleaning up some of the shapes. And then I will repeat this process. So, I copy paste it again. I remove the layer down below that is lower opacity and then I just continue cleaning it up, making my brush smaller and smaller as I go. Again, I just keep repeating this over and over again until it makes more clean and recognizable. While I'm cleaning it up, it's kind of like carving. Like you're kind of sculpting the form and the lines into this piece by using the eraser. I keep going until it looks something like this. As the lighter brush gets smaller, I will switch into a more solid smaller brush, so it's got like a bit more sketchy feel to it. And then I will start lining it like lightly. So, since
6:09 the first brush that I use is really like fluffy and dense, I will use a smallest brush to like carve out more details and finer things that I couldn't do with the bigger brush. Since we're going to paint over it, it doesn't have to look perfect. So, for this sketch as well, I sometimes bring in different kind of brushes. I will maybe use the lasso tool to like carve out a shape or I will use like a thicker brush, a solid brush. I don't know, I just kind of have fun with it until, you know, I can understand what I'm trying to show here. Using this method still keeps the flow of the sketch and it also defines the base well, so when we go in and render, we know what we're rendering. The fun thing is you can also do this with traditional art, too. So, when I'm drawing traditionally, I will just erase the sketch with like an eraser, but I won't
6:54 press too hard so I can still see it. And then I'll use different mediums to like clean up the sketch until it looks nice. And then we add the base color. For the base color, I use this tool. It is a lasso tool that auto fills with lines or it's super messy, not very accurate most of the time, but I kind of dig it. I think it complements the messy line art that I have going, so some of the edges might not be well defined or well cleaned up, but it depends on your art style and if this is something that you want. You can also just go in and like render it properly. So, but what you really want is like these like little blurry lines next to the side. These you will use for when you're rendering because you'll see later what you use this for. You can tweak this method until it works how you want to. If you want to achieve something like I do, this is how I do it. Next, set the line
7:41 art to multiply and make it a dark purple color. Since the line art is slightly transparent, it will add a lot of neat colors with useful painting later. Then I color the line art with the airbrush. Normally, I pick a darker color than the base color and I just blob it around until it like looks nice. Since the line art layer is multiply, it will always be a bit darker than the one beneath. Then you're going to have something like this. This is very This is very messy for me, but that's just because uh I prefer it like this. The more you sit and sculpt the sketch until it's super clean, the cleaner this part of the like rendering phase will be. Then I make a layer above everything and this is the layer that I'm going to paint on. So, I keep this separate because like
8:26 before, sometimes I will make a change that I don't quite like and I can just go back to the original if I don't end up liking it. Then I start cleaning up. So, the basic idea of this is use the outer color, the background color, whatever that might be, and the inner color, of whatever that might be, and I try and like make the lines skinnier. So, I try and sculpt the lines to look like line art. Let's say these two objects over here. So, this is the background color over here and this is the inner color over here. You can see this darker line here. This is the line that we set to multiply. So, I'm going to try and sculpt this line to look like line art. So, I'm basically just taking these two colors and I am making it thinner and neater. Sometimes this line in the middle here
9:12 is not going to be dark enough. So, then I zoom out on the picture and I look for a color in the line art that is like the darkest color there. And if I find something, I will take that and I will add it to the to the line. I do this because every color on this picture right here is going to suit each other. So, I don't want to add a different color from the color wheel that might not suit the hues and values that I have going on in this one. Then I do this to the entire piece. So, I go in and I try and clean up each line that I like. With this method, you can do almost any art style. You can do lineless art style if that's something that you're looking for. You can do super neat line art and like very solid line art. So, I would do this, but with more solid brush and I will just take my time doing it. Like this takes a little
9:57 bit more time cuz you kind of want to be a bit neater, but it's about the the same. Or you can just do it like I do. I just messily blotch some colors here and there and I hope it looks like it's cleaned up. Yeah, it just depends on how long you want to spend on each of these like pieces. You can get it like really neat and you can get it really messy. You can basically get it to any style you want. If you're trying to get like me, I just like to go in and add like scribbly lines. I like to add some like textures here and there. I just like to have fun with it and so like can see like, "Hey, I like this." It's about finding what works for you and how you can make the art process enjoyable for yourself. I personally don't like line art, so I've learned to avoid it, but some people really do like line art. So, then learning how to do it is good. It's just about finding what
10:43 works for you as an artist and how you can make the art process as enjoyable for yourself as you can. Some artists, for example, just don't like to color. Some artists love to color but don't sketch. Some artists like to like not sketch at all and just like to color. So, there's like a lot of different ways you can go about art to find a process that works for you. Even if you don't like line art, if you don't like a certain process of it, it doesn't make you any less of an artist than anyone else. Uh there's a lot of people that, for example, don't like to render at all. That doesn't mean they're any less of an artist cuz they don't like to paint things. Uh their art style just doesn't require to be painted, so yeah. So, just figure out what works for you and you'll be happy, I think. >> [snorts]
11:29 >> Hi. Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate that. I hope this video helped a little bit. I kind of wanted to make this cuz I remember one time when I was like just starting out of art, I Googled how to skip line art and I didn't find anything for that, so I thought like, "Hey, I I maybe I'll make one of those." Um yeah, I had a lot of fun making this video like I always do. It's always fun to get to animate and edit things. >> [gasps] >> Um I want to say thank you so much to my Patreons. You guys are great. I want to say thank you to my fan art that's like on the screen here. There was so so much fan art this time and I I was so cool to get to see everybody's work. So, I just want to say thank you so much once
12:14 again. Um I have a couple more videos planned out now that I should post throughout the next month or two. Uh yeah. I also just reached 800k, which is like that is that's crazy. I I don't think I'm ever going to process how many how much people that is. I'm probably just going to like close my eyes to it because like that is so many people. Uh so, I just want to say thank you so much. I really appreciate that. That's super super cool. Um What else? What else? Oh, yeah, I'm doing a new series on my Patreon with like like tutorials and things. They will be free to watch, so you can watch them uh but paid members will have homework and then reviews like
13:01 I will review the homework. So, if you're interested in that, I'll have my Patreon link down below. Uh This week's will be about face plans, so will be about faces and drawing faces in different angles. Um yeah, so thank you so much for watching and thank you so much to all my fan arts and like Patreons and channel members and all of these goodies and thank you for you for watching. Uh yeah. And then you just go to Skillshare as well for sponsoring this video. If you want to check them out, that'd be cool. Um yeah, I will see you in the next one. Bye.
