Dan Serra wrote:
>
> My son who is in high school has been enamored with creating cartoons
> for the past year. He prefers ink and paint and the traditional look of
> political cartoons. There is a type of shading that he has been trying
> to achieve that involves the use of diagonal lines or cross hatching
> with the regular hand inked lines. It is very tedious to do this by
> hand.
>
> His art teacher told him that in the "good old days" they used a special
> board called duo-shade where you would paint a chemical onto the board
> and the diagonal texture would flow from the brush as it developed. He
> thought that there might be software out there that might be safer than
> the chemicals and less messy. He wasn't sure if they still made this
> board anymore.
>
> He thought that either Photoshop, Illustrator or Freehand might be able
> to create this flowing diagonal texture (or pattern) but he wasn't an
> expert in any of these and neither am I. It's too expensive to buy the
> wrong one and make a mistake so I would appreciate any recommendations
> you pro's might have.
>
FreeHand certainly has cross-hatched fills -- going back quite a few
versions now. But bear in mind that they will always look rather
'stiff' in comparison to hand-drawn shading, being much more uniform
and regular. Illustrator and Photoshop (and FH as well) can fill
areas with patterns or tiles; these can be set up to look more
'handmade' than FH's automatic cross-hatching (e.g. by using a
"brush" rather than the usual uniform strokes).
BTW, in case you aren't aware of the distinction, FH and AI are
primarily "vector" drawing programs (dealing in objects and groups of
objects) while Photoshop is mainly a "raster" editor (dealing in
pixels). The former allow much greater control and 'after-drawing'
manipulation of the artwork they create, while the latter can produce
more 'natural' textures, 'soft' contours, &c.
--
Odysseus
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