Ultimate Inking and Coloring Tutorial for Adobe Illustrator CS5 (short version)

The Fastest, Easiest Method to Ink and Color in Adobe Illustrator.

See the tutorial on my blog: http://www.claytowne.com/beats-diggin...

Or download the companion Illustrator editable PDF file: http://www.claytowne.com/beats-diggin...

The brush I used is embedded in the file.

The brush I used is this Hair Brush by ChewedKandi. You'll need a DeviantArt account to download it. Download here: http://chewedkandi.deviantart.com/art...

Screenshot of brush settings used http://screencast.com/t/cVCuDIlyyUh

Tech Specs for people who are into this stuff:

I use a Wacom Intuos 4 medium size tablet for all drawing. If you are a serious artist you MUST have a tablet. At the very least get a Wacom Bamboo. They're like $50. I'm running a custom rig that I built myself back in 2009. It's a Windows 7 64 bit box with a Asus P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard. It's got 12 GB Corsair DDR3 RAM, a Pentium i7 920 CPU, a Nvida GeForce GTX 280 graphic card, six WD Caviar Black 1TB drives in a RAID 1 configuration. My OS and programs are on one RAID array, and the other two RAID arrays hold my files. I also have two RAID 1 external drives for additional backups. Rounding out the system is a Corsair XT 750 power supply, two 1000 watt UPS backups, a USB 3 PCI Express card, an eSATA PCI express card (I ran out of SATA ports with so many hard drives) a HD Pro Logitec webcam and a pair of DVD burners.

There are a lot of excellent ink and color tutorials on the web, so what is different about this tutorial?

1. Real time. Unlike those speed drawing tutorials that blow your mind but teach you nothing, this one is a true speed drawing tutorial as it's in real time. No cuts and no sped up sections to hide the true time it takes.

2. Learn a practical but unorthodox technique for speeding up your inking and coloring in Illustrator.

3. Vector. In the print industry vector rules the roost so those Photoshop inking tutorials aren't very helpful for someone who's primary concern is clean reproduction in all mediums including brochures, t-shirts, posters, trade show booths, video and packaging.

This method is not the most sophisticated but it gets the job done quick and it looks great. I also discovered one of its key components by accident.

It's great for poster art, cartoon characters, comic book art or any place you need a classic ink and color look - and need it fast

• Category

  Howto & Style

[sesar lopez]

how do i make my brush the way yours is .. the swerved line or what ever its called

[Clay Butler]

Please read the video description as suggested.

[Kris Ernewein]

Good tutorial!

But for some reason after I fill in all my colour and expand it, there's white around all of the blocks of colour, like it didn't fill in all the way. I'm not sure what I did wrong =S

[Clay Butler]

It's possible that you accidentally bumped the ink drawing ( sing the direct selection tool) right after you expanded it.  Are all the white gaps the same - meaning all slightly to the left or right?

[Mitchell Ballew]

Ok so my line art is completely transparent and wont let me color. how could I fix this?

[Clay Butler]

Keep hitting Ctr+Z until you find out where you strayed. Other than that I can't help you because what you describe is so bizarre I have no idea what you are seeing on your screen.

[OttoMotos]

and if you hold ALT it will select the whole fragment you want to delete, i guess it's faster, good tut thanx

[Pauline Loo]

good! this is very helpful! thank aload ^^

[orangefuzzz]

Thank you so much for this. I've been searching for hours on how to clean up the path lines that crossed another path (you explain at 2:50). You're amazing!

[shikigami78]

great job man. i really liked this vid

[oguzhan ada]

thanks dude, very helpfull.

[Chandar Gaur]

i like it

[TheDesignGuru]

Hi Clay,

Thanks for this, it's a different technique to how I normally do it so I'm going to give it a try. I've downloaded the brush, did you have the width set to pen pressure because your lines vary a lot and I don't see the width pt changing.