I don't ******* belive it

[Hotcod]

ok this may seem like a minor thing to you but it's something i've been struggling with for the last few weeks. Take a look at this image



There's not a whole lot of difference is there? well there shouldn't be since it's a tiny tiny change in settings. Why is such a difference important? well this dose not illustrated it as well as it could be but the line of the left is smoothed while the line on the right is not.

I like to draw in flash with the brush tool, odd i know but it's a hang over of the fact I learnt flash off my own back and dislike the pure vector style that illustrator and the flash pen tool are more geared towards. Anyway it was the natural choice for me to use to make t-shirt designs in. I'm doing noting at the moment so knocking up a website and a few t-shirts and hawlking them to friends and the like is something that's good for me alround, something to do, maybe a little money, looks good on a CV ext.

Now the problem is that while i've been drawing in flash lately it's not been working very well for me. Mainly because when you look at the image you can tell that it's drawn in flash and that makes the t-shirts look amateurish and frankly a little crap in my eyes.

Problem is compounded by the fact that my style on paper has got increasingly skechy over the years of uni and it's hard to translate that back in to images that will work well on screen printed t-shirts.



You can see what i mean here, that's a quick sketch of one of the 2 ideas i'm running with to get printed. when you look at it next to this quick play around with flash drawing



Well to me the 'drawn in flash' feeling kills it. What's annoying is the fact i can throw together something like following using mspaint



That works very well as digital based recreation of my paper style. pretty much because it's been drawn in pixels... which is a pain in the ass to turn to the vectors i need and is a pain in the ass to do in paint. Given there's no 'draw pixel like' brush i can find for flash (for the love of god tell me if there is) i found my self kind of stuck battling with ways to get rid of that 'drawn in flash' feeling... most of them where simply not to draw in flash or take the drawings to that pen tool vectoring that I don't like nor am i any good at. I even tried using bitmap trace on the msnpaint bitmap and while they worked to an extent there's simply no hope of building and editing a desgin in the way i need to in that way.

And now back to the first picture...



The line of the left is smother 'cus the brush tool is set to smoothness 50, the line of the right is set to 0. Something I only just realised i could do. What clear, to me sleep deprived brain, is the "drawn in flash" feeling i've been getting comes purely and utterly from the way it smooths the line. The line of the right is a constant width and stops round, the line of the left is curved more, thins in places and ends in dragged out points. In essence flash is doing a lot to the line that i'm not asking for nor want. In other words if you look at the 2 there the one on the right looks like it could have been the start of the MS painting the one of the left does not.

My feeling now is that i can simply get on with drawing in flash with the smoothness of and have the images come out looking more like i want them and less like i've done them in flash... all for one tiny fing slider

Edit:

This is also one of the first times i've realised just how much I did learn in uni, i may not have been able to pull a degree out of it but the fact that such a small change in line is something i can analyse and put in a context that helps me achieve the end result i'm looking for is something I wouldn't have been able to do with out it.

[Disgustipated]

Cool story, bro.

[Hotcod]

Thanks I just really really needed to explain that to some one 'cus it's driven me a bit crazy, but it's 9:30Am so most of my 'real life' friends are in bed or going to work heh