Line weight

Varying the thickness of your line can improve your art in several ways. It’s an incredibly powerful tool at your disposal. Using thicker and thinner lines can have three different effects.

Heavier lines indicate shading. Letting your lines get heavy in areas that are further from the light source in the illustration (and thinner are they’re closer to the light) can add instant three-dimensionality to your drawing.

Lighter lines fall into the background. You can push items into the back of the scene by drawing them with lighter lines. Drawing a heavy border around an item will bring it to the foreground.

Lines can be used as compositional tools. Lines of a heavier weight can organize the shapes into a unit. You can use similar heavier lines to tell your readers what items are important in a clutterered scene.

One popular visual method is to draw a heavy outline around all foreground characters. This look can be very striking, and the main result is that the foreground pops nicely off the background. But, like adding salt to a recipe, it’s something that needs to be applied judiciously.

Look at the lines that are used to create the images in your comic. If they're all the same weight, you might be missing an opportunity to compose your scenes more effectively.

Let's look at a few examples of you line weight can be used to improve a visual.

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