So, uh... I did a thing. ^^;

Longterm watchers of mine from dA might realise something about this in that in my 12 years of doing digital art, this is my first ever polished digital picture with lineart on it. There are a two reasons why I've never done digital lineart. The first is that I'm rubbish at it. The second is that I think painting without lines gets you closer to realism, but in truth, this was a post-facto justification for the former reason for the longest time. I've never been able to draw a good line on my tablet and I kept thinking that everyone who could must know something that I didn't. Turned out I was half right. I started talking to  reforger, who does comic style work of a high standard and he pointed me to "Lazy Nezumi" which is a "stabiliser" for Photoshop: a piece of software that smooths your strokes and removes some of the variance and noise. I downloaded it and while it wasn't an instant-win cheat-code for lineart, I could immediately see the power of the tool. Lineart went from being "impossible" to just "hard".

I drew a sketch on paper and set to work trying it out and experimenting to determine which settings worked for me. It was tough going at first and much of the lineart around that wolf is pretty poor, but as I went across to Murk I started to figure things out. I think parts like Murk's left hand are a night-and-day improvement over, say, the wolf's chest armour in terms of line quality. I want to keep working on this and I'm thinking of trying to do a few really quick, relatively simple bust-size sketches of various characters in order to really get into the groove with ditigal lineart. I think this is a worthwhile pursuit because like nothing else, lineart teaches precision and manual dexterity. A line is right in one place and wrong in every other place. Get it perfect or go home. For a long time, I've wedged this precision gap with dogged stubbornness and exploited the forgivingness of Photoshop to work in high resolution. I'm going to continue to do my highly polished paintings without lines, but at the same time, I think more lined drawings to a lower level of completion will improve my art across the board and hopefully make me faster to boot. It is of note that this took me two days where something like Post Bellum took over a month.

This picture was my first experiment with the technique, however, the subject is something new too. I've decided I'm going to make Murk a spin-off setting from  SteinWill's Rebels setting. Before Murk joined the rebel army, he served for a few years as a mercenary and I decided to delve into that era of his life a bit more. My tastes are a little more grimdark and edgy than Steinwill's and this will give me somewhere I can go and be edgy without corrupting his setting. :giggle:
I have an outline for each of the members of Murk's old squad in my head and I'm quite keen to get them on canvas. I drew this wolf character without really any thought though so while he's likely to be a named character going forward, he'll be completely different next time you see him. :)

Watch this space.

Happy for any critique on this. I'm completely new to digital lineart and adapting my colouring and shading technique to having lines hasn't been easy either so I'm sure there's plenty of room for improvement.