Every stage of the art process is important when it comes to digital art, whether it is sketching, shading or lineart. This lesson, I’m going to focus on the more neglected stage – lineart and the importance of Line Weight.
Why do I feel it’s neglected?
I feel it’s neglected because I feel a lot of people who use lineart in their artworks don’t tend to focus on specific techniques when it comes to lining their works. Some artists I’ve seen tend to just see lineart as a tool to clean up their sketches, and not a process in its own right. It’s more than just cleaning up the artwork, it’s an important process of also building up the feel of the art itself. This is why I’m emphasising the importance of line weight when it comes to lineart.
What is Line Weight?
Line weight is, to put it short, the heaviness/thickness of lineart in an artwork. It’s a useful tool to emphasising important parts of the artwork or giving the artwork a good amount of depth. More amateur artists will tend to focus very hard on how smooth their lineart is but forget all about the variation of weight to it. A combination of both will give you some excellent lineart, for example:
Smooth lineart on its own looks fine, but it’s also pretty boring. There isn’t much to focus on, and it looks a little flat. The first thing you can improve on is shadows:
Where the lines tend to interact, you can add a little extra shadow and thickness to it so that it looks heavier will make the artwork pop a bit. As you can see, it already adds a little more to the art by making it as a whole pop out. However, you can do more to it by emphasising material and softness:
Personally I like to make hair a thinner line weight compared to the rest of the body because hair is silky, thin and smooth, so I like to emphasise that in my artwork. I also feel it makes the chin pop out a little more when doing that also. Overall, it’s a matter of personal preference, but it’s always good to experiment. My rule of thumb is always that more smooth materials (hair, clothes, etc.) tend to have lighter line weights compared to thick harder materials (metal, bone etc.).
Line weight is also good for foreshortening
If you’re unfamiliar, foreshortening is a drawing technique which creates the illusion of depth and perspective by distorting the artwork at an angle so that things appear to be receding or coming into the viewer’s POV. For example, if someone was reaching out to you, their arm would appear shorter but it would get thicker as it got closer to you.
This is where line weight comes into place, if something is closer to your POV then it will not only appear bigger but ideally the lineart itself should become thicker to emphasise this. To put it short, if it’s closer, make it thicker.
Final Thoughts
Overall line weight is good for emphasising parts of the body and giving the viewer an idea of the perspective and material of each part of the artwork you’re doing.
Use thinner lineart for:
- Softer materials (Clothes, hair, etc.)
- Areas that are far away
- For small details
Use thicker lineart for:
- Harder/bigger materials (Metal, Bone, etc.)
- Areas that are getting close to the viewer
That’s all from me today! If you have any questions, feel free to comment, and I’ll get back to you!
Zuiri out~