I was after some instant satisfaction yesterday and not much into monsters so decided to do a google-bot version for my lovely wife’s WordPress SEO blog (hmm, the “instant satisfaction” bit now sounds a little ambiguous…good;)). I used a tiny post it sketch for that – I really wanted it fast, which I then traced roughly in PS on another layer and inked digitally using lasso tool on yet another layer. Lasso is my favorite tool for linework in photoshop. It’s pretty fast and there gives that nice, choppy look since I am mostly using straight lines.
Small TIP here: should you want to use some cross-hatching with this technique, instead of selecting the shapes one by one on the same layer, create one “cross-hatch” shape on a new layer, then duplicate it by Click+alt-dragging (or click+shift+alt to drag in a straight line) the amount of times you need it and flatten these layer afterwards.
Having the cross hatch on the separate layer will allow you to reuse it as long as you don’t want to change the angle of that layer too much – remember it’s pixels we’re talking so any transformations, except for “flip horizontal” or “flip vertical” will create fuzzy edges.
Enjoy
