The lineart - from a Struggle to a Love

Lineart is an inherent part to drawing, one day you stumble on it, you may like it, you may not, but its here and you probably done some.
You may ignore it and go without it if you hate it, you may do it you entire style if you love it.
Or you may never choose.

I am in this last case, I stumbled upon lineart multiple time trough the years, tried different approaches and what was in the day a struggle has become fun with the years, to the point its now a huge part of my art style.

So lets speak about this journey and my different encounters with lineart, a story that is also a bit of my story as an artist.

2018 - The lines of a baby artist

When I started drawing (or more like when I started drawing ttrpg characters, because I don't remember a time I wasn't drawing), I wasn't even thinking you could avoid lineart. It was a no question for me, first you do lines, then optionally you add colors. Often drawing far from home back then, I was doing mostly lines with pencils or random ballpoint pen I could find and few colors.

In 2018, I get a big set of watercolor pencils (fabercastel albrecht dürer ones) and this started a long list of colored drawing of my ttrpg characters. I was doing the base with pencils, then ballpoint and in the evening, back home, pencils and a bit a water to add colors.

This is what I've done as art for a couple years, and I must said that to this days I am still fond of these drawings. Maybe one day I will go back to similar methods, and somehow my way of linearting always been influenced by the fact I learnt to draw with ballpoint pen.

2021 - My first path in the digital world

I get my first drawing tablet, an old wacom intuos, years before these drawings, nearly never used it to do the initial drawing, only to colors. Often the initial lines where done with pencils on some random sheet of papers, and then I brought the art in clip studio paint to add colors, and it was rare. I've done less then 20 digital drawings in seven years !

But after falling into DnD, one day I stumbled onto artofmtg.com, and get literally lost there. Thousands of amazing art of badass characters I could only dream of creating myself. In all those, one artist you all known about, and one specific piece that sparked something in me : Vraska, Regal Gorgon by Magali Villeneuve. From there the idea I could maybe draw crazily cool badass evil women started it way in my head. Winter 2021, middle of another lockdown, I've created a twitter account to follow some ttrpg creators and discovered the art community. This give me the motivation to bring back my graphic tablet and start learning how to create these beautiful illustration for good.

What my past self haven't planned was how much a pain it was for me to actually draw on a graphic tablet without screen, my hand at one place and the image at another one. This plus a lack of line stabilization (I wasn't knowing back then this was a setting) doing lineart was near impossible. What "saved" me was clip studio vector layers. I were doing "bad" lines then patching them with the line correction tool and moving points. This was taking ages and was really tedious, so no guess why I wasn't loving lineart back then !

This was my first time trying to draw without lines (or more like getting ride of lines as soon as possible), but soon a change was to comes...

2021 - The return of the lineart

Lineart was tedious but I loved the art game and wanted to do more of it. So when I get the opportunity to bought a second hand ipad and an apple pencil for really cheap I jumped on it. It was one of the best decision in my life. To this day I am still working mostly on ipad, and it unlocked something in my brain. All of a sudden, lineart was easy again, and my first drawing on ipad was just a lineart with really basics colors, because lineart was so fun !

All my thought of no lineart where over and I've done a lot of really lineart focus art back at this time. It also allowed me to be more quick, allowing me to do a lot of drawing, have a lot of fun, and learn a ton. The whole year from there was lineart, sometime lineart with more strokes, sometime thinner lineart, but always structural lineart. I learned a lot and by the end of the years I had quite a good method to create drawing helped with a strong lineart (and could have put more effort into learning colors and shadows, but that's another day story).

2022 - Back and forth

But all that's was really linear (haha) and easy right ? So time for more twist and turns in the story ! Early 2022 was hard for me, not that's much on the drawing side but two years of covid and a lot of questions about my studies left me really tired and it felt in my drawings. I hadn't the patience I had in the end of 2021 left and my lineart, even on the same bases were done without enough attention, less details, and lower level of finish. I've also stopped relaying on clip studio 3d model as much back then but hadn't understand already that I needed to look at some sort of ref to get my ambitious poses right. So the lineart was still there but I was frustrated of it. Looking back at it from today I can tell I should have take more time on these drawings, work on my anatomy and study clothes to get out of that dead end, but that's always easy seeing it from the future.

Frustrated with lineart ? Looking up to cool art without lineart on the final ? My past self found another solutions that the one my present self would have suggested : going no lineart again ! I have few early wip left from this era but I remember clearly that every drawing had a completely different process than the precedent one, but for sure I trusted the process !

In the same time, mermay was around the corner and I wanted to redo a drawing from 2021. I started it, and surprisingly (for me) loved my lineart. I pushed it more and suddenly didn't even feel like coloring it, I just loved it like that. Also you can note that I brought back important principle on this one : line thickness variation and hatching lines shadows.

From this I tried lineart again, and also I had rested a lot since the start of the year and this time I was far more happy with what I was doing. But soon after I've started a really big rendered drawing that burnt me out a bit and I needed multiple work to recover, so that was a short lineart gold era.

And soon after I felt like doing more ambitious work again, I've started doing my first mentorship with Indicreates (back in the day she was doing digital works), and she get me the key to start actually improve my rendering skills and doing my first step into realism art world. The studies I've done after this mentorship pushed me to focus on forms and so I've started going no lineart at all again.

I still felt a bit loss without any lineart, and trough the following month I used lineart again but only as a base to place the element before moving forward, and not for lineart itself. It was the most basics lines, just roughly rights and that's good, no work put into it.

2023 - No lineart again ?

During the second half of 2022 and most of 2023 I've put most of my energy into learning how to paint. I had so many things to learn, so many new discovery : colors, material rendering, compositions, shadows, etc... enough to get lost and completely forgot about lineart.

The main evolution for the first half of the year was my lines progressively getting more confident and me taking more time building my bases, planning more and relying less on reference only.

But in the end of summer 2023 I was quite unhappy with my art and tried something different with rendering, using a new brush, and tried as an experiment to not use lineart. I loved the results and so for the second half of 2023 I was building again from forms only, but this time more confidently, having learnt a lot of things since last try.

2024 - The lineart come back for good !

Early 2024 was back to a mid 2023 stage of "basic lineart to help plan everything". I must says that every time I wanted to be more ambitious with my composition I get back to lineart, because it help me to flesh out my ideas before moving forward. Also in early 2024 I've done a couple of fun experiment, trying to add some lineart in the finals but it was mostly a mix of painting and lines without really choosing.

The really change come in spring 2024, at the very beginning of TrueRef. At this time I had a lot of time for my drawings, and TrueRef give me the references I needed to be motivated to study. I've started a series of nearly daily studies, turning them in my old ttrpg characters and going back to lineart and flat colors for these. It was incredibly fun ! And from this time I haven't stopped offering lineart work along my main, painted, art style ! You can also see than my default format for personal art was found there also.

Another new element from back then is that I started having a sketchbook and so sketching again with ballpoint pen, after years nearly always working digitally. This pushed me to improve my lineart a lot and I had a lot of fun doing quick study turned into oc/fanart, starting in pencil, then first layer in red pen and final layer with black pen.

A few time after I was staring my new stone witches series. I knew I wanted some simpler style for it as my aim is (and still) to do 37 drawing for this series. Lineart was a good solution, especially as I wanted to inspire myself from dragon age tarot card art style. Once the decision was took, the peace was signed with lineart : I was promising myself around three year of lineart work to comes ! Also on these first stone witches, I was still searching a bit for the exact styles and it started with simple lineart, mostly on the character, and huge white elements.

During the rest of the years I've done as much lineart based drawing as painted work and get the opportunity to experiment a lot with my lineart, having fun and testing new things. By the end of the year not only my lineart improved but also the lines hidden in my painting process were strong and more detailed.

2025 - When a new brush change everything

2025 started as 2024 ended : doing a lot of art and experimenting with my lineart style, finding new cool things on the way. One of the earlier in the year was while working on my stone witches I tried to use some bolder lines as an outline for the characters, inspired by stain glass. It was only the first try and it took me quite some time and a lot of drawing to find the exact recipe but the idea was here and is still a huge part of my lineart style to this day !

Another change was that I started building more complex scenes (and even more after my first round of Paul Scott Canavan mentorship) and as I get more in comfort zone with lineart it started to be a tool to build these. Meaning even in my lineless final there were stronger lineart behind. Also building these more detailed lineart sketch helped me plan better and make the rendering easier, because I knew where I wanted to go with my drawing.

After the mentorship I drew a lot more with pencils again, in my sketchbook, and even done some huge portrait with pencil on a big canson paper sheet. This motivate me to try again clip studio paint default pencil brush and after some twist I discovered I just loved it. In addition to cool pressure adaptation, it allowed me to do both hatching and toning without changing brush. I loved that and to this day this brush is still my main sketching and lineart brush.

I discovered one last tool a bit later in the summer : I wanted to keep the wider lines outlines on some of the drawing, but the pencil brush was less good for that than my precedent one. The solution came from a good mechanical pencil brush, that allowed me to get a strong clean line but with a less digital feeling.

2026 - Ready for new lineart adventure !

We are finally at the end of this story, that start to be really long, congratulations if you reached this point !

On the lineart based drawings part, the main evolution since the end of 2025 is that I decided to do the darker outlines in all my lineart drawing, now that I know more how to dose it, I prefer my art with it than without it ! I also get more used to working with lineart : more confident in my shading, and a better balance between all the different elements of the lineart.

On the lineart as a base for painted art side, I still pushing more and more details in the lineart sketch. I showed in my dinorider process post some of it, but the second round of Paul Scott Canavan mentorship made me even more conscious of how much preparation is needed to achieve a mtg level illustration. So I take the time needed and try to solve everything in the lineart phase, before moving to rendering.

Thank you for reading trough this whole post ! I hope you loved this dive in my art journey, I may do some other because the milestone weren't the same of every part of my art !

Also I am currently working on some really cool project with my line based art style and I can't wait to show you what !