I don't want to ink them, because any time I try to ink them the lines aren't smooth (I don't have a very steady hand). And I tend to like keeping the pencil sketches.

So I heard a few places that Adobe Illustrator was good for creating line art. (Good thing, too, because I was trying to use Paint Shop Pro's bezier line tool -- workable, but a bitch to get things to look right, since you only have two curve points in the line.)

I loaded me up a copy of Illustrator 9 and played around with it a bit. Kind of a complex little program. Now, I tried using the autotrace tool, but it puts a double line in places where there should only be a single line.

The other tools seem kind of... complicated. (Well, the whole program seems that way, to tell the truth.) And I've searched for tutorials and tips, online, but none of them are for the very specific type of work I'm doing -- line art over a scanned pencil sketch. So none of them really apply.

As for Illustrator as a good lineart program,
Well it is good for BW lineart because it is Vector based.

But as you allready discovered, it is a time consuming thing to creat complicated lineart from scratch.

The good thing about Vector drawing is, that no matter how much you change the size of your drawing, the lines will allways be sharp.

There are programs out there that can convert a normal pixel based image, into a vector drawing (adobe streamline for example).
The result however depends alot on the quality of the original drawing .

Traum4 has a tutorial on his page that covers digital inking in pixelbased programs (photoshop, paintshop pro).

Otherwise I would say that the best way to ink is still by hand.
Because it is the fastest way.
I've been told that with more practice the lines will get better and the hands stop shaking.

For saving your pencil work,
I can give you the tip of inking a copy of the pencil drawing.

Either by actualy going to a copyshop or by scanning in your drawing and reprinting it on a new sheet of paper.

The third way would be using a light box to trace your work by hand

btw alot artist dont use ink at all (bomu seems to be one of them )

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Wer nicht vom Meister lernt, lernt nie etwas.

I'm afraid that CGing is kind of new territory for me. I've been attempting to color my pictures on the computer for a while, now, I've just never been very good at it. With the tips I've gotten from this site (Organic Metal) and a few others, I can definitely say I'm at least improving, though I'm far from being where I'd like to be, skill-wise.

The line art problem seems to be one of my hurdles. My art does tend to be smudgy, but my scanner only seems to accentuate that. When I try to do the shadow/midtone/highlight adjustment, I end up losing parts of lines or still have horrible smudges.

The Kawaii Carrot site did have a lot of good CGing tips that I'll be certain to use, but unfortunately his line art tips are for someone with a Wacom tablet, and thus far I haven't had the funds to invest in something like that. I'll try to do what he talked about, but I don't think I'll get the smooth lines with my mouse.

As for what I was talking about with the bezier line tool, out of PSP, here's my latest project I did a few weeks ago -- I did him up with the line tool and I guess it's alright, but still wasn't what I was shooting for:

chibi_seph.html

Right now, the one I was trying to line art-ify was this sketch:

eladeya.jpg.html

You can see how smudgy my sketches scan in. And this one has more detail than the little chibi thing I did in fifteen minutes, above. I don't think PSP's line tool is going to cut it on this one. Maybe I should just go ahead and drop that $300 on a tablet.

To get rid of smudges,
I would recommed harder pencils they smudge alot less compared to softer pencils

$300 what kind of tablet do you look for.

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Wer nicht vom Meister lernt, lernt nie etwas.

And it only cost me $99 (actually I got it for my bday, but thats besides the point)

Ideally, one day I'll either be good at inking my own drawings by hand, or team up with some amazing inker like Meth and get them to do it all for me... ;)

I heard Adobe Streamline is good for getting lines smooth, but I don't know - I don't have it myself...

Pixie

Yes, about $100 sounds much more reasonable, though they advertise the Graphire2 tablet as being for photo manipulation, and (being clueless on the whole tablet thing) I wasn't sure if it would do what I wanted.

Before I saw FunkyC's post, I took their little "which tablet is best for you" test and it kept trying to push one of the more expensive tablets on me -- go figure.

I like the smaller size better, this way I dont have to move my arm to draw from one edge to the other.

And yes the graphire is in my eyes a good enough tablet for coloring and drawing.

btw. FunkyC if you dont like the feel of the
plastic nib on the tablet surface, just place a paper on it.

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Wer nicht vom Meister lernt, lernt nie etwas.