Help drawing with Stylus or Importing good scans

[Phlexxon]

Hello everyone. I'm no stranger to this site, and you all are very helpful. In fact, as far as I am, I owe a great deal to the kind souls here. Thanks for that. Alright--sappy time is over---this is the real shizzle:

I suck with a stylus right now. I mean, is it just that I need practice? That it's very small? my style? I don't know. I mean, I'm a great artist without the stylus, and I want to use the scan and vectorize method, but that's very time consuming and wasteful. My question: how do I transfer my outside art into Flash with the stylus nicely?

Or is there another method I should know about?

Thanks,

Phlexx

[[TFS]DrNick]

'ello.

The process I use is:

1) Scan my pencil art and import it into Flash.

2) Convert it to a movie clip, and lower the Alpha to about 46%. Lock the layer.

3) Create a new layer bove it, and break ot the pencil tool (or the pen tool if you're comfortable with Bezier curves).

4) Loosely trace the linework using the mouse (trust me,it'll work). Don't worry about being too neat; you can sort it later. Overlap the ends of your lines, and use the 'tap' setting on the eraser to cut off the bits past where the lines join.

5) Select each section of line and use either the point select tool to alter the anchor points of your lines, or the 'smooth' option (appears on the left when you select a line) to make the lines on screen match the ones on your pencil drawing.

6) If you want to preserve the changing thickness of your linework, trace everything using the 'hairline' setting, and go around the outside edges of the lines. Fill in the gap between them, then delete the outside lines - this way your image won't have a uniform line weight.

7) Use fills and gradient fills to colour your linework.

Et voila! An infinitely scaleable illustration! This method also avoids the 'odd' line thicknesses you can get from letting Flash (or Streamline) trace your image for you.

[Phlexxon]

Your method takes time, but the end result is worth it. Excellent. The only problem I have is--I need to do this...say 2000 more times. In animation, time is limited, so there are setbacks with this.

From what you gave, however, I can manage. Thanks again.

[The_e-Tahn]

Hello,
I generally draw most of my pics on paper, but I also like to do stuff via tablet. What type/brand do you have? I'm pretty sure all Wacom tablets have a surface that lifts up so you can put a sheet of paper below it, so you can trace it into your computer... here's what I do:

if I have a pic that I really like (that I drew on paper), I generally need to Xerox it to make it larger (but that's cuz I draw pretty small). Then, I'll take the bigger version (the Xeroxed one), and put it under the transparent "sheet surface" or whatever you wanna call it. I'll go into Flash, take out the pencil tool, set it to "ink", then, if I really feel detaily, I'll also set the ink thickness to "hairline".
Next, I trace the entire picture. Once I'm done tracing, I'll zoom in and brush up the pic (meaning straighten out lines, take away extra lines, etc etc etc). then, I'll set the pencil's color to red (or something that'll heavily oppose the colors of the picture), and draw in all the shading... actually, before that, I'll color everything in with the basic colors, then I'll go over w/ the red pencil and mark the shading. Once that's done, I'll color in the shaded areas. After all the shading's complete, I'll select (w/ the pointer/cursor/mouse tool, whatever you call it), click on each line (double or triple-click to select the whole line) then hit the "delete" key. I do this for each of the red shading lines. once that's done, the pic's done!

but it sounds like you're doing animations, and quite a lot of them... When I'm just drawing straight into the computer (and it might take some practice... I'd just make some doodle/sketch files in flash, just to get used to it)... I'll use the Brush tool, with about the third-to-top thickness of brush, with the brush sensitivity on. sometimes I'll make a sketch of what I want on one layer, then select the layer, make it a blue with alpha of about 46%, lock the layer, make a new layer, and make "final" lines, tracing the sketch... it'll give the sketch a nice stylized look, because the lines will be uneven, hence more artistic looking... then, I'll do the same coloring method as before mentioned, and... yeah.

well, I hope this helped! but if you have 2000 pages to go through, all on paper... I'd take each one (if possible), put it into the transparent sheet on the tablet, trace it with the brush tool, and go on to the next pic... well, good luck! hope this was somewhat helpful.