Digital Inking Tutorial Video #6 - Adobe Illustrator Graphic Styles and Grouping

Click on image - video will open in new window

Video #6 - Graphic Styles & Grouping

A Graphic Style is the stored combination of a line's stroke color and brush shape, or a color and fill of a shape. It means you can select anything in your image and instantly apply many different stylistic properties all at once, really quickly.

I have created a few graphic styles that I use when I'm inking comic books, like "Black line, no fill" or "White fill, no line," etc. These are included in the downloadable Adobe Illustrator Inking Template that I made to go along with these tutorial videos.

There are different versions of the template, so whichever version of Adobe Illustrator you are using, you will find the right inking template.

You can download the Adobe Illustrator Inking Template at:

http://cartoonsnap.com/template/

You can see in this video how graphic styles are applied. Graphic styles are easy to create and modify, and I show you exactly how I do it. Then we'll cover the topic of grouping.

Each stroke or shape in Adobe Illustrator is seen by the application as a distinct item that can be moved or colored separately. It's often easier to deal with all of these different elements if you tie them together into groups that makes sense in the context of the illustration. Again, this is kind of hard to explain in text, which is exactly why I made the videos!

Here's a YouTube version of the same video if you're having any problems viewing the high-resolution video at the top of the post.
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In case you missed them,
here are links to the first five
Adobe Illustrator Inking tutorial videos:

#1 - Setting Up and Importing Images
#2 - Palette Options and settings
#3 - Freehand Calligraphic BRUSH Tool
#4 We Start INKING in Illustrator!
#5 - Ellipse Shape Tools

Gangsters, Gunsels, Crooks, Cops and...Hitler! Willard Mullin Draws Some Amazing Characters

If you want to learn how to draw people in lively dynamic poses...even regular folks doing everyday things..you can't do better than to study these amazing drawings of civilians by legendary sports cartoonist Willard Mullin.

Click any image for a ridiculously HUGE high-resolution scan

As you can see from previous posts on Willard Mullin (see links at bottom), he was the master at drawing sports cartoons that had a breakneck and electrified sense of life. But it wasn't just athletes that received this treatment...Willard Mullin could infuse even the most mundane activity with the breath of life.

These scans are the last batch from the book, "It Beats Working."

The previous sets of boxing, baseball, football and horse-racing cartoons from the same book are linked at the bottom of this post.

great silhouettes, leading the eye, line of action, nothing is horizontal or vertical, beautifully unbalanced balance
Previous posts on Willard Mullin:

Willard Mullin on Boxing

Willard Mullin on Baseball &Football

Willard Mullin on Horse Racing

You'll find lots more links when you see those posts, too!