Time to deploy the secret weapon

Finally ready to draw

Today I received my graphics tablet and it allows me the opportunity to trace the image I drew instead of having to copy it by eye. And in classical me style, I'm skipping the chapter that teaches me how to draw art work in illustrator and just crack on.

First image, Poseidon

The first Image I have decided to trace is Poseidon (the bottom left image) so I could practice tracing with the pen. First thing I did select a different type of brush from the library and selected artistic calligraphic and chose a 5 point oval brush.

From there, I had to change the setting of the brush and changed the roundness of the brush to 75% to make the brush more round.

I then changed size to 3 point as the brush was a little too thick, changed the option to pressure instead of fixed so I could make use of the pen and changed the variation to 2 point, so the harder I pressed the pen on the tablet, the thicker the stroke.

After doing the outline of the crown, I added a new sub layer to the layer for Poseidon and started to draw the outline of his hair. The reason for doing this was so that when it comes down to touching up the images and editing the paths, I could layer the images in an appropriate order.

After I had finished with Poseidon, I decided to quickly outline the main images for Zeus and Hades. After all of the objects had been drawn onto their relevant layers, it was time to edit the outlines.

A lot of fine tuning was needed

The main problem with trying to draw free hand or with a mouse is that if you are quite new or not very artistic (both in my case), you cant get the lines you want and will see little bits hanging over and corners not looking as sharp or as rounded as you would like them.

So the first thing I had to do was copy and paste all of the art work into a separate layer as the technique I am about to use would not make the original an editable brush stroke.

I selected all the artwork and expanded the appearance, selected live make and then expanded the appearance from live make so I could remove the extra lines and edit the paths that needed editing. So at this stage before the editing I was at this point:

After tracing the image, before editing phase

Seeing as the editing phase for the paths is going to take a very long time, it is best to call it a day and start fresh again in the morning. Hopefully tomorrow, I will be able to fill the images in with colour and creat some sort of drop shadow and shine to the relevant pieces.