Wizards Elenore

Yet more SAI practice, with this session's target of opportunity being Elenore from Ralph Bakshi's Wizards.

I learned quite a bit more about the inner workings of SAI from this experiment in inking. For one, inking by hand in SAI is incredibly fast and easy once you google for advice and learn there's a special setting in the program that helps to smooth out the jitters with hand-tablet drawings. There's a thing called "Stabilizer" that kinda slows down the cursor so the lines you make are not as saw edge as normally would be in other drawing programs like Corel Painter, or PhotoShop.

All of the lines except for the one curl of hair next to Elenore's right cheek were smoothed out with a mild number 5 setting on the stabilizer, however that one sort of rough looking double curl turned out like that because I didn't realize that you could also turn your canvas to draw just like you could a piece of paper, so I drew that wiggly lock of hair just as you see it - vertically in a single pass.. It sort of looks okay, but I suppose if I had cranked up the stabilizer further it would have smoothed out more, that or I could have turned her on her side and dragged my stylus sideways, a naturally more comfortable direction.

Overally I gotta say that I LIKE SAI!! It's hellishly quick when drawing free-hand, much more so than even PhotoShop, and now I see why so many artist swear by this killer combo... SAI and PS.. It just rocks!

So provided mine isn't a trial-ware version [still hasn't figured out how to tell] I'm going to be using SAI for rapid hand inking just like this, while PS will be used for color work or inking with paths when absolute precision is needed.

*****

Fairy Princess Elenore = Ralph Bakshi
Art by moi
Made with PhotoShop-7[rough sketch] then inked in Paint Tool SAI