First-ever hand-drawn background

[cobra79]

Do you mean the anti-aliasing? You can turn that off and use the pencil tool.

[ildu]

The "infantile" look of the Section 37-B sign is just because I drew it by hand...I will replace it with a real font in the final output.

No no, I didn't mean the sign, I was just referring to the bg by saying that code. What I'm saying is that I find it really interesting with that kind of felt pen on white paper look. And it looks childlike, which is a good thing. It reminds me of the style in scandinavian cartoons.

Photoshop tries to draw "in between" the pixels with the brush tool. Is there a way around that?

Are you talking about anti-aliasing? If you don't want any anti-aliasing, only single-color pixels, use the pencil tool. Otherwise if you're looking for brush settings, click F5 and the Brushes menu will pop up. There you can find different configs like pressure sensitivity with different attributes, brush types, the flow of the brush, etc.

[TerranRich]

Gotcha. And what I mean is that, when zoomed out to 100%, the brush seems to draw differently than at 200%. I still want antialiasing. In fact, I want it stronger. The hardness, opacity, etc. are all turned up, and the spacing is down to 1%. What else could I do to get a stronger, blacker line when using the brush?

[ildu]

This is a common thing with PS. It's not that it's a problem, it's more of a characteristic of the program. What most artists do with almost anything digitally drawn or painted is they double, triple or even quadruple the size of the canvas in ratio to the final output. If you sketch at 50% on a 1000x1000px canvas, and then resize to 500x500px, it'll look loads better. Also, when you start painting, you'll be surprised how restricting even 2000x2000px is in getting detail down. I always sketch at 50% and I usually paint at 3-4 times the output size (for example 3200x2400px for a 800x600px image).

[TerranRich]

That's a great idea! I should try that! Thanks!