I can offer some info.
If you can afford it, get a graphics tablet and pen. While they don't equal pencils/pens/brushes on paper, they are more subtle than mouse work, and much more spontaneous.
Take a look at both Designer's vector brush in the draw personna set, and the brush in the pixels personna.
For the vector brush, look at the textured set of brushes. Personally, I find the vector brush really interesting. What it does is record a vector, and stretch a bit-map texture along that. One can go back, and change the shape of the line, the width of the stroke, its color, etc.
The pixel brush has quite a few samples of drawing and painting brush styles. While each pixel layer it makes can be adjusted in various ways, once the lines are laid down, that's it except for erasing as in traditional media.
You can make your own brushes. I've made a few. I haven't been very happy with them, but with some work, I think I could come up with decent ones. There are 3rd party brushes available that are a good bit more subtle. 2 forum members offer some for sale, under the name Daub brushes and Frankentoon. Not too pricey, and it saves the time of having to learn and create your own.
Shading in a digital medium is quite easy if you take advantage of the opacity/transparency settings. You can, of course, us a traditional approach of cross hatching many fine strokes, layer over layer. However, by controlling a pixel layer's opacity, you can get just the amount of effect you want from one broad pass. Another reason I like the vector brush is that one can make a set of strokes, group those, duplicate the group, and then use the transparency tool to fade the upper layer away, giving a dramatic toning of the under layer.
You can place any photo as a background, use an adjustment to fade it in some way, and lock the layer. Then create new layers on top for tracing.
As far as composition goes, what would you ordinarily do? If you want, you can display guidelines or grids to use as a visual framework. Or you can draw simple vector shapes (think comic strip boxes) that are snapped to the grid/guides, and confine drawing work to strokes nested inside those.
artisticperspective reacted to gdenby in Drawing in Designer