LESSON 24 · ARTRAGE 6

Oils sit on top of the canvas. Dry media dig into it, and watercolour sinks into it. All three are driven by the same thing — the grain of the surface you chose in L22 — which is why the same pencil can look like a soft graphite smudge on one canvas and a scratchy conte line on another. This lesson covers pencil, ink and watercolour, and how to combine them in one painting.

SOFTWARE

Finish first: L6, L22, L23

• Your L22 grain reference sheet open for comparison
• A pencil drawing of your own you would like to ink and colour
• Artist 12 connected, and your L3 pressure curve in place

WATCH

Ambient Design — The developers walking through the pencil's own settings — worth more than any third-party guess.

Ambient Design — A complete line-art-to-colour run in one sitting, which is exactly this lesson's practice.

Ambient Design — Flatting a drawing by hand is slow. This is the fast, correct way to do it.

THE LESSON

With the Oil Brush, the canvas texture is one influence among several. With pencils, chalks and anything else that drags across the surface, grain is the whole story. A dry mark is made where the tool touches the raised parts of the tooth and skipped where the surface dips. Coarse grain gives you a broken, gritty line; fine grain gives you a smooth, dense one. Nothing about the tool changed.

So the first decision in a drawing-led piece is not which pencil to use, it is which canvas to draw on. Go back to your L22 test sheet and look at how the same stroke behaved on each surface. And remember the rule from that lesson: changing the canvas later does not touch paint already on it, so the surface has to be right before you start.

Watercolour uses the same surface differently. Rather than skipping over the grain, thin colour runs into it and settles in the low points, which is why a wash on a coarse canvas looks granular and one on a smooth canvas looks even.

Your X4 stylus reports 16,384 levels of pressure and 60 degrees of tilt, and the pencil is where you will feel both most clearly. Pressure does the obvious job — light for construction lines, heavy for the lines you mean. Tilt is the part people never test: lay the pen over toward the canvas instead of holding it upright, and see how the stroke changes. That is the digital equivalent of using the side of the lead rather than the point, and it is how you shade an area quickly without hatching every millimetre of it.

The pencil has its own settings panel, and rather than list sliders here, spend five minutes with the Ambient Design video above and change one setting at a time on a scrap canvas. That habit — one change, one test stroke, look — is worth more than memorising any panel.

One piece of technique carries straight over from L6: draw from the elbow, not the fingers, and let pressure rather than repetition build the line. Digital pencils reward a single confident stroke and punish twenty nervous ones, exactly like real ones.

The Ink Pen gives you the opposite of the pencil: flat, dense, hard-edged line with none of the surface breaking through. That is what you want for line art you intend to colour, because a clean closed shape is what makes the next step possible. Work on a dedicated layer, keep your pencil drawing on a layer underneath at reduced opacity, and ink over it.

Line weight is what makes ink look professional. Thicker lines on the shadow side and on the outer silhouette, thinner lines inside the form and on lit edges. That single rule does most of the work.

Once the line art is closed, the Fill tool puts flat colour down in one click per shape. Put the flats on a layer beneath your ink, not above it, so the line stays crisp. If the Fill leaks out into the background, you have a gap in your line — find it and close it rather than fighting the fill. Ambient Design's Fill Tool video shows the settings that control how far a fill spreads into a soft edge.

Watercolour is the tool that punishes hurry. It works in transparent passes: each wash you lay lets the one underneath show through, so the colour builds up gradually and the paper — or in this case the canvas — supplies the lightest value. Plan your lights as the areas you simply leave alone.

Work light to dark, and let a wash settle before you cross it, exactly as you would on paper. Wet colour meeting wet colour will bleed and mingle, which is either the best thing about the medium or a mess, depending entirely on whether you meant it. Keep separate washes on separate layers while you are learning, so a bad pass costs you one layer rather than the painting.

Combining all three is the classic workflow and the point of the practice below: pencil construction underneath, ink over the top, flats from the Fill tool, and watercolour washes to give the flats life. Save the whole thing as a .ptg — layers, wetness and all — before you export anything.

PRACTICE · 45 MIN

1. Open L24-ink-wash-template.ptg. It has four layers already named and stacked in the right order.
2. On the 'Pencil' layer, draw a simple subject in construction lines: a boot, a teapot, a bird. Ten minutes, no more.
3. Drop that layer's opacity to about 30 per cent.
4. On the 'Ink' layer, ink the drawing with the Ink Pen. Deliberately vary line weight: heavier on the shadow side and the outer silhouette.
5. Check every shape you intend to fill is fully closed. Zoom in on the joins.
6. On the 'Flats' layer, beneath the ink, use the Fill tool to lay one flat colour per shape from your L22 colour collection.
7. On the 'Wash' layer, add watercolour over the flats in two passes, letting the first settle before the second. Leave your lightest areas untouched.
8. Hide the 'Pencil' layer.
9. Save as .ptg first, then export a PNG alongside it.

Done when: A finished ink-and-wash drawing where no fill has leaked outside a line, the lightest value in the piece is bare canvas rather than white paint, and both a .ptg and a PNG sit in your ArtRage folder with the same base name.

Download these and work along with the lesson.

CHECK YOURSELF

Answer out loud first, then open each one to compare.