Notable issues affecting the design of the Survey’s digital dashed-line brush stroke Of course, most of our drawings contain less dramatic architectural features, while presented in a significantly reduced size, so, seemingly, none of these issues has a critical impact on the end result. The third visual defect came from the “blockiness” of the line, occasionally causing weird angles when following sharp turns and steep curves ( 3). The other irregularity came from the nature of how this specific brush was designed and materialized in a small amount of “ghosting” at the edge of each segment ( 2). One notable issue was that - regardless of the line direction - hitting the screen once always resulted a single horizontal segment ( 1).

It was a usable design, however some problems occurred with this solution that we’d like to address here. In our initial version we designed a specific square brush to create a dashed line by reducing its roundness, increasing its spacing and finally turning on the angle jitter in Shape Dynamics to control its direction.

You can find the tutorial on how to craft a dashed line (for a 1200dpi environment) as part of our chapter discussing digital inking methods and also as a separate tutorial.ĭashed line characteristics shown in the Survey’s guidelines and on an inked drawing (MHB 163 – detail)Īccording to the Chicago method, an architectural feature must be rendered as a dashed line when in juncture of two walls (internal corner), or a wall and ceiling where - assuming the drawing is created in 1:4 - each 28 pixels wide line segment is 4mm long with a 2mm gap in between. The digital equivalents of our dotted and inked line conventions appeared in the first edition of the Digital Epigraphy manual in 2014. Naturally, the digital EPIGRAPHY website has integrated these guidelines into the Second Chapter of our Manual. The Epigraphic Survey provides detailed instructions on how specific architectural features should be rendered when appear as part of a line drawing.

Dedicating an entire article for such a nuanced topic might seem like an overkill for some, however, knowing how certain Photoshop brush settings work and understanding how we can tweak these features to our liking is an essential part of digital documentation.

How to make a square brush in photoshop