LESSON 29 · PHOTOSHOP FOR ARTISTS

Line weight is a decision you make about the drawing, not a setting you turn on. This lesson covers where heavy lines belong and why, how to set up Photoshop for solid confident inking, and an honest account of what stabilization does and does not fix. It finishes with closing your shapes so colouring is one click instead of an hour of patching.

SOFTWARE

Finish first: L6, L9, L26, L27, L28

• Your inking brush from Lesson 27, or a hard round at 100% hardness
• L29-inking-practice.psd open
• Enough desk space to draw from the elbow rather than the wrist

WATCH

Ctrl+Paint — The whole idea in one short video: weight is a drawing decision, and no brush setting will make it for you.

Baylee Jae — Practical, watch-over-the-shoulder examples of where weight actually goes on a finished character.

Winged Canvas — Modern replacement for the line-control slot: smoothing, stroke confidence and line quality. Winged Canvas is the most age-matched channel in the library, and this avoids sending him to Clip Studio UI he does not own.

THE LESSON

A drawing made of one thickness of line looks flat and slightly dead, even when the proportions are right. Weight tells the eye which edge is in front, which form turns away, and which part of the picture matters. You author it, like a value composition.

Four places heavy line belongs. On the outer silhouette, separating the character from the background. At overlaps, where one form passes in front of another: thickening the front one reads instantly as depth. At contact points, where something presses on something else or meets the ground. And on the shadow side of a form, where a line thickens as it rolls away from the light and thins as it comes back.

Four places it does not: interior detail like folds and hair strands, anything meant to sit further away, texture, and anywhere the line describes a change in colour rather than form.

Within a stroke, taper matters as much as thickness. Organic forms want a line that starts thin, swells where the form is fullest, and tapers out again. That taper comes from pen pressure, which is why the brush below routes pressure to size and nothing else.

The test is simple: zoom out until the drawing is thumbnail-sized. If it still reads clearly, your weight is doing its job. If it turns into a grey tangle, it is not.

With the Brush tool active, the options bar has a Smoothing percentage. At 0 the line follows your pen exactly. Between 10 and 25 you get a light assist that removes tremor without much lag. Above 50 the line trails the cursor visibly, which some like for long sweeping curves and most find disorienting.

The gear icon beside it holds four modes. Pulled String Mode behaves like a leash: the line only moves once you drag far enough to pull the string taut, which gives very controlled curves. Stroke Catch-up lets the line continue to your cursor when you pause, and Catch-up on Stroke End completes it when you lift. Adjust for Zoom lowers smoothing as you zoom in, so a close-up stroke does not feel like treacle.

Now the honest part. Stabilization removes tremor. It does not remove hesitation, fix a curve aimed wrong, or save a line drawn slowly and nervously. Run high smoothing over a wobbly stroke and you get a smoother wobbly stroke, the wobble baked in as waves. A filter, not a skill.

The actual fix is the one from Lesson 6. Draw from the elbow and shoulder, not the wrist. Ghost the stroke two or three times above the glass, then draw it fast, in one pass. A confident wrong line beats a timid nearly-right one, because you can see what went wrong and fix it next time. And rotate the canvas with R so every line is a pull toward your body. That habit does more for line quality than any slider in the program.

Ink on a dedicated LINES layer above your sketch, with the sketch dropped to about 30% opacity so you see it without tracing slavishly. Work at 300 ppi at your intended print size, then reduce for screen at the end. Scaling down hides small imperfections; scaling up reveals them.

Brush setup: a hard round tip, hardness 100%, spacing 1 to 5 percent, Opacity 100, Flow 100. In Brush Settings turn Shape Dynamics on with Size Jitter's Control set to Pen Pressure and Minimum Diameter near zero, and leave Transfer off. Thickness should vary, darkness never, because a line that fades to grey under light pressure looks uncertain rather than delicate. Then check the two pressure toggles in the options bar from Lesson 27; the opacity one must be off.

Two shortcuts for strokes a hand cannot make. Click once with the brush, then Shift-click elsewhere: Photoshop draws a straight line between the points. For long clean curves, draw a path with the Pen tool, right-click and choose Stroke Path with Simulate Pressure ticked. Use it sparingly: it looks exactly as machine-made as it is.

Every gap in your line art becomes a leak when you colour. Before filling anything, hide the white Background and drop a bright magenta layer beneath the lines. Any hole shows up instantly as magenta bleeding through. Patch those gaps on the LINES layer.

To fill: take the Magic Wand, turn Sample All Layers off, leave Contiguous ticked, and click inside a region with the LINES layer targeted. The selection stops at the outermost anti-aliased pixels, so a straight fill leaves a pale halo. Fix it with Select > Modify > Expand by 1 or 2 pixels, tucking the selection under the soft edge of the line. Then make a new layer below the lines and fill with Edit > Fill.

Give each region its own flat layer: Lesson 28's clipping masks are only useful if the flats are separated. Then a colour hold on the line art is one move: turn on Lock Transparent Pixels for the LINES layer and paint colour into the lines, warm in the light and cool in the shadows.

Then judge it. Image > Image Rotation > Flip Canvas Horizontal shows the drawing with fresh eyes, and every lopsided curve you had gone blind to. Zoom out to thumbnail size and squint. If the silhouette holds and the weight leads your eye where you meant, the inking pass is done.

PRACTICE · 45 MIN

1. Open L29-inking-practice.psd. The SKETCH layer is already at 30% opacity and there is an empty LINES layer above it.
2. Set up your inking brush: hard round, hardness 100, Opacity 100, Flow 100, Shape Dynamics on with Size Jitter on Pen Pressure, Minimum Diameter 0, Transfer off.
3. Set Smoothing to 0 and ink the top drill strip: ten long curves, drawing from the elbow, ghosting each one twice before you commit.
4. Set Smoothing to 15 and ink the same ten curves in the second strip. Set it to 60 and do the third. Compare all three honestly and pick the value you will actually use.
5. Now ink the main drawing on the LINES layer. Rotate the canvas with R for every awkward curve. Undo and redraw anything that comes out wrong rather than patching it.
6. Second pass, weight only: thicken the outer silhouette, every overlap where one form sits in front of another, every contact point, and the shadow side of the larger forms.
7. Hide the white Background and switch on the magenta LEAK CHECK layer. Fix every gap you find on the LINES layer.
8. Magic Wand each region with Sample All Layers off, Select > Modify > Expand by 2 px, then fill on a new layer inside the FLATS group. One layer per region.
9. Turn on Lock Transparent Pixels for the LINES layer and paint a colour hold: warmer lines in the lit areas, cooler ones in shadow.
10. Flip the canvas horizontally, zoom out to thumbnail size, and squint. Note the three worst lines and redraw them.

Done when: Every region fills in one click with no white halo, the drawing reads clearly at thumbnail size, and you can point to four specific places where you added weight on purpose and say why.

Download these and work along with the lesson.

CHECK YOURSELF

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