In the eyes of established, professional, cartoon artists, what is the best pencil, eraser and paper to use for drawing cartoons?
Pencils: There is a wide range of all what you can do with a simple graphite pencil: As a beginner, I would suggest sticking to 4B. It's soft enough to give you variation of up to 7-9B, but it's manageable enough to give you the crisp 5-4H results. The best part is smudging and shading using this pencil to get the desired depth in your drawing. Preferred brand: Faber Castell  Erasers: I found regular gum erases (Staedtler) to work just fine. Sharp corners help in defining edges, and the rest of the body is easy to use and avoids messing up the drawing. Especially when using a 4B pencil, you will be making a lot of mess on your sheet unless you're careful. You will need a good eraser. Paper: This is my favourite part. Below is a link to the page that details paper types. My personal favourite was always textured/charcoal paper that is typically meant for charcoal and soft pastels. It makes the drawings more dynamic. But other types include: Newsprint PaperNewsprint is a thin, rough paper meant for sketching with charcoal, pencil, conte crayons, pastels and chalk. This type of drawing paper is often wholly made of recycled material and can be used during the preliminary stages of a fully rendered figure drawing, landscape drawing or portrait. The ability to easily erase mistakes and blend tones, makes newsprint perfect for students and beginners. Charcoal PaperCharcoal paper gets its name from the ribbed texture on its surface that makes it ideal for charcoal, soft and hard pastels. Due to their powdery nature, charcoal and pastels do not bind well to smooth surfaces, and require paper with a substantial amount of tooth or texture. This kind of drawing paper is often made of cotton and is available in neutral tones and various sizes.Bristol BoardBristol board is a bright white, thick and sturdy paper for finished drawings. Light Bristol board is used for pencil drawing, while heavier versions of Bristol paper are meant to be used for ink drawing and painting. Bristol drawing paper is available in two main types: plate and vellum. Plate has a very smooth surface, while vellum provides texture that can be utilized with charcoal and pastel work.Stick with charcoal if you're just starting out. Try various shades of cream, ivory etc. It's a lot of fun, you won't be disappointed. Drawing Pencils Guide and FAQ Types of Paper Used in Drawing
What are the pros and cons of using PaintTool SAI vs Photoshop?
PaintTool SAI is actually one of the old color painting application in existence that is dating back to X68000 platform by SHARP in Japanese Market, and it was reintroduced to PC platform around 2008 after nearly 8 years of development and alpha and beta testing.It is never intended to compete with Photoshop, Painter or Paintshop Pro, but rather supplement it by offering one significant advantage in how you operate paint brush and other brush tool to draw specific line using tablet.It major advantage to other software is very detailed ability to do vector brush when working with supported tablet. And because of that it is very popular production tool in comic, manga or anime looks illustration.However it is tend to lack in other tool, and it has its place as unique tool for vector brush and other brush tool where artist tend to use this to create specific line on vector then bring it back to other painting, image editing, or illustration tool.So, there are not much pro con things is there. unless you intend to do whole painting / illustration things on PaintTool SAI or Photoshop… although both can do it, they are not exactly specialized tool for it.If you want to draw Manga, Comic, Anime illustration and could not figure out some of line other artist are used in their art work. And spend hours endlessly on Painter, Photoshop, Illustrator, or CorelDraw, using PaintTool SAI is probably the answer. But it is fairly specialized tool, and it is always recommended to uses it with other painting or illustration tool.Painttool SAI is one the secret tool of Japanese Manga/Anime illustration artist uses, and it has large following despite its very limited functionality, because it specialize in certain things, and doing it lot better than other software.But, for other routine task, use photoshop,painter, paintshop pro, illustrator or Corel Draw is much better solutions.
Drawing tablet + photoshop brushes and technique question?
Those perfect ink lines are achieved with vectors. The pen tool is the main vectoring tool in Photoshop drawing. It's a difficult tool to learn to use. It's counter intuitive to use so everyone has trouble with it at first. Here's a tutorial for the pen. http://www.melissaclifton.com/tutorial-p... Take your time. It takes practice to get it. Many of these artists use Illustrator to do the inking. It's the vector counterpart of Photoshop. And it has more vectoring tools than Photoshop does. Vectors are not lines. They're plotted paths. Those paths are either filled, Stroked or blank. To do the inking, you'll be stroking the paths. When you stroke a path, the program uses the brush tip, color and engine settings of the current brush. Whether you're stroking paths or "painting" lines using the brush you need to understand how the brush engine settings affect your output. If you want your lines to be solid and even, you shouldn't have any of the engine controls set to Pen Pressure. If you set the size jitter control to Pen Pressure, the lines will be fatter when you apply more pressure, and thinner when you use a lighter stroke. If you set the Opacity jitter to Pen Pressure, the lines will be more opaque with more pressure and more translucent with a lighter touch. Watch the graphic at the bottom of the Brush engine to get a read on what changing the settings does to the response of the brush. I know all of this sounds overwhelming but if you have the talent to draw, you'll be able to learn the computer skills to do it in a digital medium. It's just a steep learning curve at the beginning.