Help! Need Major Help With The Basics!

[RIKIN]

Dear Conceptart dudes and dudettes,

I REALLY would love to be able to create cool looking digital Creature Concepts. I can draw pretty well, but CANNOT do anything digitally.

I'd love it if someone could direct me to a good book, website, or if someone could give me instructions in the basics like:

1. If I was to scan a pencil drawing in, WHAT DPI should it be at?
2. What type of scan? RGB? Greyscale?????
3. Do I then open it up in Painter, and duplicate the layer???
etc, etc.

I really need help and hope someone can help me out!
I'd like to be able to produce pretty cool creature designs from my inital pencil sketches.....

Any help would be cool.

Cheers ,
Rikin

[Fredbt]

You may get as many answers as there are artists, but I can tell you how I work and what works best for me.

Scanning Resolution depends on what you want to do with your final art. A general rule is to scan and paint at 300 ppi or more. That will give you a decent image should you want to print on an ink jet printer.

Scanning Color I scan in RGB since my final image will be in color. If printed on a litho press, a higher resolution should be considered and the art needs to be converted to CMYK (with color correction from RGB to CMYK taken into consideration.)

Pencil Sketch on a Layer When you open your scanned sketch in Painter it will be on the canvas, however you can move the sketch up to a transparent layer. (We had a discussion on this subject a while back and Jin had some good ideas about this. I don't know exactly where that message thread is.) What works for me is to select Move Up to a Watercolor Layer in the layer palette. "Watercolor" means nothing to me at this point. It is merely a way to get the pencil sketch on a transparent layer.

Painting Once I have my pencil sketch on a transparent layer above the canvas, I paint on the canvas below the layer. That way, my pencil lines are undisturbed and my sketch/guide is always visible to me.

As I said, there are several ways to work. This is what works best for me.

Hope this helps. :^^:

fredtaylorart.com (http://fredtaylorart.com/)

[Fredbt]

PS: Most artists paint best with a Wacom tablet (http://www.wacom.com/). To me painting with a mouse is like trying to paint with a rock! :\