A line is the basic element of all art. Every artist has at some point drawn a line. You see line art every day and everywhere--advertisements, posters, product packaging, logos and even mass media like television and the Internet. Artists from Leonardo Da Vinci to Andy Warhol have used lines as simple as a single line on a canvas to as complex as blueprints for a building. Line art is the foundation of our visual world.
What Is Line Art?
Line art is a single-color drawing generally made with a pencil or pen. The drawing has no solid areas and very little effects other than cross-hatching. Line art is usually black and white and with some degree of shading.
History and Printing Line Art
Before photos, line art was the only available way of visually representing an object or person. Printing is done without conversion to a halftone image (creating a pattern of dots to form a picture). Line art is usually created today with a computer using Adobe Photoshop.
Photoshop and Line Art
In Photoshop, a line art drawing is done using the pen tool. Photoshop has several pen types, brushes and tools for artists to use in creating drawings and other works of art. You can even turn photos into line art.
Line Art and Adobe Illustrator
Another Adobe package that can be used to create computerized line art is Illustrator.
Illustrator is a valuable program for creating drawings, sketches and cartoon-style illustrations due to its set of tools for drawing---the brush, the pen, lasso, bucket and the way the program saves your line art. Your line art is saved as vector art, which is an image saved as lines with coordinates of starting and ending points. The images are similar to hand-drawn line images. Also Illustrator has the ability for you to place many layers or drawings on top of other layers or drawings to make a complete picture.
Starting a Line Art Project
Line art drawings take time to complete especially if done by hand. When planning a drawing, an outline is drawn first and then detail is added along with shading. Line art requires a steady hand and a skilled eye. The eyes and hands must work together to produce the drawing. Rulers are generally not used when producing line art.
