Traditional Artist Workshops
5
Cleaning up
An eraser is just as important for creating clean line art as the
pencil itself. I tend to work with mine constantly when creating clean
lines and the small eraser head is great at fixing lines that get too thick.
However, a kneaded eraser is perfect for lifting up lines that are too
dark, so having both is recommended.4
Line thickness
There are some neat tricks you can use for line thickness.
Thicker lines often represent importance or are closer to the viewer in
relation to other objects in the scene. They can also separate
overlapping subject matter and the lines within tend to be thinner.
You can see how the outside line of
this rabbit is thicker while the inside
lines are thinner. This helps
differentiate the outside lines of the
subject matter from the lines that
represent the details within.Whenever a line gets too
thick, I either erase the
entire line or try to line up
the eraser edge to slim
down the existing line.I like to clean up during the entire
process and at the end do a final
sweep to make sure I didn’t miss
an area before calling it done.This is an example of
different line weights
from thin to thick and
a simplified example
of an object with
thicker exterior
outlines and thinner
interior lines.