Bubbles III

Pilot revisited

Two years ago i made this little doodle on paper which turned out nice enough for me wanting to try inking in a vector program.
I had discovered Jason Secrest's super cool YT channel, but despite trying various techniques i was never able to get something i liked.

My first attempt was all about rebuilding the sketch with shapes in Inkscape, then applying "comic brushes" with 'Pattern along path', just as i learned from Jason's tutorials.
But i wasnt satisfied with the outcome. With the perfect symmetry it had lost all the charme the original drawing had...

My next step was to try and ink with a tablet. Took me ages to get a handle with the tablet and i have to say: i cant do it. My lines never come out as i want them, so for me this is very different to drawing on paper.
Gimp has no working pressure sensitivity, Inkscape's smoothing feature didnt work too well and Krita lags on my outdated machine.

I also tried the 'Power Stroke LPE' in Inkscape, which i dont find very practical. Its much easier and convenient to apply "brushes".

But there is a spanish blog im following and one of the posts had the look i wanted. Turns out the artist used a rather punk-ish approach to trace his art with the Bezier Tool, so thats what i did as well.
Its not perfect yet, because i still have to clean up the lines a bit, but this is my best result so far. I used the 'Fill between strokes LPE' and a nice little trick im keeping to myself. But this may also solve my attempts on trying to trace a posterized image, like Shepard Fairey or Ben Hito do.

The colouring was done in Inkscape. The background texture and halftone glow in Gimp.