I did it!! I managed to clean up the Victorian Mermaiden this morning!
Oooooh, so cleaned up and pretty!
It took a few hours of work, but I think I managed to make this look really nice! I created a custom brush stroke to use on the inking lines, and then had to fiddle with the settings for a while to get a stroke that wasn’t too thick. It helped that I scaled the drawing up by 250%, but was able to keep the stroke width of the inking from scaling up with it!
See the difference between the before and after images!
No line variation, just thick heavy clunky lines!
MUCH better! The lines look like ink strokes, and the colors look nicer too!
I spent a lot of time playing with the colors. The background frame really gave me trouble. The original colors were way too dark, but I wanted to have a strong contrast between the frame and the mermaiden. So when the dark colors weren’t working, I went in the opposite direction. Lightening up the frame made a huge difference!
I still want to add a few touches to the background frame, but this one is pretty close to done. Yay!