Gatillos

Let’s sample some of the results of my experimentation…

Here are some scans:

This is hand-drawn, first drafted with a regular pencil, then more-or-less-inked using pens. As you can see I don’t really know what to do with the brush-like pen I bought so I tried using it to make some lines stronger but it didn’t work too well.

I didn’t erase the pencil, so you can actually see what I changed.

I upgraded to Inkscape 0.48 and so far it’s not going too well, it crashes a lot but this time it usually saves your work correctly before dying. There are a few good things, though. One of them is the Spray Tool.

As I’m trying different drawing styles, one thing that is very nice and quite easy to do by hand (albeit a bit tedious) is ‘crosshatching’ to display shades. That is, using lots and lots of lines to represent shades, forming a pattern. My first surprise was that there is no standard crosshatch pattern for filling, which seems odd (it has stripes, sand and other strange ones). There must be a reason but in any case that type of crosshatching is always perfect and that is not what I wanted.

I see lots of people praising the calligraphy tool in Inkscape, like these guys. That tool is essentially the one that lets you draw as if you were holding some kind of pen or a brush. It’s pressure-sensitive so it generates more or less realistic and ‘alive’ strokes.

On the other hand, the pencil tool generates just plain bezier lines that you can bend and modify afterwards. It follows your trace and kind of approximates what you are trying to do. After drawing a stroke, you can modify it quite easily, whilst the calligraphy tool generates strokes that contain so many nodes that it’s not worth trying to rearrange it, it’s just better to redraw that particular stroke.