Sketching Idea When You Have Just a Mouse

[hseiken]

Not all the time will you have paper on hand to sketch your idea, or a scanner or camera to get that image into Xara to vector out. Or sometimes, like my situation, your hand just doesn't really want to cooperate with you to get the sketch lines you know you can do. After getting a little discouraged from my sketches just not living up to my personal standards in terms of line work, I frustratingly just opened up Xara and started making curved lines then realized...there's an interesting way to use the regular line tools to sketch!

Most of the time when making vector lines, you're really wanting a connected line or you are interested in making a closed shape. Instead of doing this, treat each line, only consisting of 2 points, as a single 'sketchy stroke' you'd make by hand and adjust the start and end curves. Don't connect any lines whatsoever so that your last line doesn't get effected by the follow-up curve edits! It allows you to quickly create the sketch 'under drawing' that you can use as a guide to actually fill in/finish your drawing.

I've included two screenshots to illustrate the concept. The first image is the 'just disconnected sketch lines' that I put on it's own layer.


And then on a new layer (after locking the sketch layer so that I don't accidentally edit or select any of it), that's where your actual final drawing will use those curves, but you'll create multi-point lines following the under drawing separated lines.
I obviously embellished and added more elements and details to the original sketch, but again, that sketch was just a guide line to help me out.


I just thought I'd post this as an idea for anyone who wanted to experiment with the initial idea stage using just vectors for whatever reason.

Peace!