Linework Tips

Quick Tips: 

• Hold the pen perpendicular to the paper and not in your normal grip if you want an even line weight (traditional)

• Your natural pen grip will give you variations in the line thickness depending on the pressure of the pen (traditional)

• Draw fast. You have more control over a quick stroke than a slow one 

• You want the thinnest lines to be where the most light is falling, and the thickest lines to be in the areas of shadow. 

Exercises

I use these to train my muscle memory for line work, and also as drawing warmups sometimes. They’re a little tedious but I’ve found them useful.

I recommend doing these exercises traditionally, even if you’re planning to ink digitally. Use whatever pen you plan to ink your drawing with most often to practice. A felt tipped (like a micron) pen, or a roller ball pen (like a ballpoint or gel pen) are best. Calligraphy and brush pens can be powerful tools, but they require more advanced techniques. I don’t know enough calligraphy pens to help, and with brush pens, I still rely on the muscle memory from these exercises. It’s best to do these on blank paper, but if you’re very new to these types of exercises, lined, graph, or dotted paper might help in the beginning.

Straight Lines

Keep your pen straight up and down, perpendicular to the paper. Use a ruler or straight edge to draw a perfectly straight line in a quick stroke. This will not only be a reference for you, but helps to train your muscle memory. 

Using quick strokes, draw straight lines- you want them not bent, and also at the correct angle across the page. You can rotate your page to a comfortable angle for drawing, but keep it in the same position for all the exercises. 

Draw straight lines freehand, until they start to improve. It’ll happen faster than you think.

Now hold the pen as you normally would and repeat the exercise. You’ll find that the line varies in thickness (“weight”) a little bit. The thicker part of the line is most likely where your stroke begins. 

When you’re comfortable and drawing fairly straight lines with your natural grip, it’s time to change it up a little.

Try to control the weight of the line so that the stroke starts thin, and the thick end is where your hand stops. This is very tricky. It’s great to try it, but don’t let it frustrate you. 

Circles

Pen perpendicular to the paper again. 

Using a single stroke, draw a circle as perfectly as you can. Do this several times until your circles begin to improve. 

Now let your fall into your natural grip. 

Draw the circles again, but this time practicing controlling the weight of the lines. 

You’ll notice that the circle tends to be thickest where the ends of your line meet. Practice making those ends meet seamlessly- so that it’s not obvious where you started drawing the circle from.

If you’re feeling very ambitious, you can try to move the thickest part of the circle around the edge, while keeping your start position the same. This is really tough, I’m still learning it myself!