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Arting dilemma
Nov. 15th, 2023 06:04 pmDrawn art, especially ink style, looks best with varying line weights.
Procreate, the digital art app I use, pairs with Apple Pencil to allow variation based on pencil angle and/or pressure. The handbook says
These can be set per brush (e.g a calligraphy brush may vary line weight and a pencil brush may instead vary opacity) and also app-wide (changing sensitivity or pressure curve, or disabling entirely).
Here's the problem I'm having: given essentially zero mobility, I can't use the tilt sensitivity at all, because my wrist doesn't move so the angle of the pencil is always changing; and for similar reasons I'm struggling with pressure sensitivity. I can't reliably control whether the pressure at the end of a stroke matches the beginning, and I honestly don't know how much is skill/practice and how much is disability "can't".
Things like brush size and opacity can be changed manually between strokes -- I can do things like "increase brush size and decrease opacity" to mimic the tilt effect, or "do some lines at one size then other lines at a thinner size" -- but that doesn't help give variety within a stroke.
Calligraphy is a prime example for this: standardly, some strokes are thick and others are thin, and maybe you can do a letter like F by "set size to big, do thick vertical, set size to small, do horizontal strokes", but doing an O with separate horizontal and vertical strokes just looks odd.
And I just haven't really figured out how to do thick-to-thin that a) looks good, and b) doesn't involve magically getting more movement ...
Procreate, the digital art app I use, pairs with Apple Pencil to allow variation based on pencil angle and/or pressure. The handbook says
For example, you can tie brush size to Apple Pencil pressure, so when you press down harder you get a thicker stroke. Or you can tie brush tilt to opacity. So you get a solid line when you hold your brush upright, but that line gradually fades out as you tilt your pencil. And you can go so much further. Associating scatter with tilt or color change with pressure. You can even morph between two different brush textures depending on the input from your Apple Pencil.
These can be set per brush (e.g a calligraphy brush may vary line weight and a pencil brush may instead vary opacity) and also app-wide (changing sensitivity or pressure curve, or disabling entirely).
Here's the problem I'm having: given essentially zero mobility, I can't use the tilt sensitivity at all, because my wrist doesn't move so the angle of the pencil is always changing; and for similar reasons I'm struggling with pressure sensitivity. I can't reliably control whether the pressure at the end of a stroke matches the beginning, and I honestly don't know how much is skill/practice and how much is disability "can't".
Things like brush size and opacity can be changed manually between strokes -- I can do things like "increase brush size and decrease opacity" to mimic the tilt effect, or "do some lines at one size then other lines at a thinner size" -- but that doesn't help give variety within a stroke.
Calligraphy is a prime example for this: standardly, some strokes are thick and others are thin, and maybe you can do a letter like F by "set size to big, do thick vertical, set size to small, do horizontal strokes", but doing an O with separate horizontal and vertical strokes just looks odd.
And I just haven't really figured out how to do thick-to-thin that a) looks good, and b) doesn't involve magically getting more movement ...