Nameless Abbey

[grayrt]

Continuing my quest for a good workflow, I decided to try my hand at starting my linework in a program I'm very familiar with: AutoCAD. I find that it's easier for me to get good, quick and accurate lines with AutoCAD, so I figured I'd try that out. I specifically wanted to make something with a lot of curves (which I find especially frustrating to do in photoshop) and with some repetitive elements that I could easily copy/paste with accuracy.

Setting this up actually took a bit of experimentation. Actually drafting up the building was relatively quick work, maybe 20-30 minutes. It took longer setting up the layout properties in AutoCAD paperspace and making sure my plot settings were correct. My first couple of tries had the scale work out correctly, but I was off of my photoshop grid due to some origin issues in ACAD. Now I've got it set up where when I plot a pdf it aligns correctly with a 100 pixel grid in my .psd file, which allows me to have the grid in photoshop and manipulate as desired.

After bringing the pdf into photoshop, I copy it to a new working layer, select all, then stroke the lines. This time I used a 2px hard round brush using a dark blue color value, and set the layer to color burn at 83% opacity.

Coming up next is all the artsy stuff to make this look better.