2D Toolkit: Lineless Art Techniques

Lineless Art Practice

Lineless art and digital painting is the technique of creating pieces that do not have line art: where, instead of a harsh line separating bodies of mass in the piece, they are instead defined through value and tone. Blocks of colour show the difference between different areas of the piece, with value and contrast used to sharpen these differences creating new lines and defining the forms. To practice this, I used a piece of line art I created of an alien character. 

Drawn using pen, I found that - with some correction to make the line art pop a bit more - it worked well as a basis for the digital painting. With the layer of the pen drawing set to multiply, it blended into the background: this let me change the transparency of the line art to help in defining my forms and keeping to the shapes of the initial drawing.

When creating this piece I used a value painting to block out the forms of the character. In future pieces, I will try to up the contrast between these values, as I believe the piece looks somewhat muddy. 

This technique will be useful when creating digital painting pieces, or otherwise pieces that do not include harsh line art: I may also use it when rendering materials and other 3D forms.


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