Wendy's "Sketchy" Line Art Tutorial

Want to make a sig like mine?


Here's a step-by-step on how to learn. Enjoy!

NOTE: Ok, here it is. I've been working on it for a few hours periodically every time Sythe goes down. (Which is often XD) Anyways, I hope this answers some of the questions that ALOT of you have been asking me about some of my GFX. (My signature specifically) If this tut gets good ratings I'll consider a sequel on color.


"Line Art"

I use mainly Photoshop (PS). PSP and GIMP work well too, but this Tutorial will be PS based.

So you've got a sketch, and you wanna digitize it. Firstly, you want nice, clean, black outlines. There are 3 ways to achieve this:

1. Scan your sketch, use a program to outline
2. Manually draw your outlines straight onto the sketch. Erase the pencil sketch lines.
3. Scan your sketch, use a program to outline

Scan your sketch. Print it out preferably in a light color. (Cyan works fine)

Ink onto that. Scan and remove the color, leaving you with the outline.

I'm only going to focus on the third. The second method works, but might get ugly, especially if your sketches are as messy like mine. The first method is great, but takes FOREVER. There's also very little to talk about for it, no sophisticated techniques really, just sit there and patiently do it.

STEP 1: SCANNING

Scan your sketch.
Since it's only a sketch, you don't need to do it at super high dpi. Use about 300dpi, just because Wendy said so.



STEP 2: TWEAKING

Mess with your sketch until it's:

• Clear enough to ink
• Easy to remove once you print & ink on top of it

Crop it! No point in keeping blank bits of paper around the edges of your picture. Use the auto-Levels, in order to fix up the contrast so it's strictly black and white.



SAVE. Image quality isn't much of an issue here, you just want to preserve the basic shape and form - so go ahead and use low quality .jpeg if you like, .png is even better.

If your sketch seems unbalanced, I've found a good way to tell if this is the case and fix them- Flip the sketch horizontally, and ink it like that.

We need to make this picture into an "easy-to-remove" color as well. I use cyan, but you can get away with other colors as well (Maybe yellow, or neon). Probably best to stick to cyan. Use the Hue/Sat/Light control to colorize your picture...



You need to put the lightness reasonably high to make sure that the sketch is easy to get rid of once you've inked the picture. I tend to find that anywhere over about 70 works quite well. It may also depend on your scanner.

STEP 3: PRINTING AND INKING

Make sure that your sketch occupies as much of the paper as you want it to, (i.e. if you want to draw a full A4 piece then make sure you're printing the sketch out that big) Scaling it up after you've inked it is ugly and not recommended, might as well ink bigger in the first place

Get yourself some nice, cheap, disposable fine-lined pens or something similar, preferably in a variety of sizes, and start off with the outlines of the shapes. Use a thick pen, and as you move onto finer and finer detail, shift down to thinner and thinner pens. Easy enough?

Don't worry too much about making mistakes - You can always edit those later digitally.

STEP 4: SECOND SCAN

Wendy <3 Scanners (Scan it again and save as a high quality)



STEP 5: REMOVING "SKETCHY" LINES

If you flipped your picture earlier, you might want to flip it back now and see how it looks!

Ok, this is where the sneakiness begins. Muahaha. (Ok, not that kind of sneakiness) With your scanned, inked picture, look to the bottom right of your Photoshop window- you should currently be inside the "Layers" tab in the bottom-rightmost palette. Select "Channels", and you should end up with something like this:



Depending on the color you used, if you select the individual channels, you'll notice that certain aspects of your picture become more or less prolific. (hehe big word) Selecting red, for example, makes the sketchy lines become monochromatic and kinda dark:



The red channel contains most of the sketchy lines, so delete it. Hopefully most of your sketchy lines will be burned in the fires of Mordor. Your picture might turn a funny color. So delete another channel (I suggest Magenta), and you'll end up with some clean black outlines. (Use auto-levels again)



Step 6: CLEANING

Clean up any little mistakes. Just use the eraser (Make sure your background color is set to white!) and the brush tool (Make sure your foreground color is black!) to fix up any extra/missing lines. If your picture looks a little dirty, just play with the levels some more.



Moving the highlighted arrowhead to the left will get rid of any faint smudges or noise that might be present on your picture. The further you move it, the more noise you'll remove, BUT it will also start to make your outlines a little more sharp so be careful not to overdo it.

STEP 7: TRANSPARENCY

You could use this line art in its current state for your coloring. By duplicating the layer, setting it's mode to "Multiply" and coloring and adding layers behind it, you would get some good results. But there's a better way... by changing it from a black and white layer to a black and transparent layer- you can use layer grouping, preserve transparency or other fancy effects to do such things as colorize parts your line art, easily superimpose your picture over a background and stuff.

So how do you do it? It's a little tricky, pay attention:

1. Click the one that looks like a ring of dots. (The one on the left of the picture above and, coincidentally, the leftmost button in the palette too) This selects all the 'non-zero' parts of your line art. (Wendy calls them "White stuff")
2. Now, go to the "layers" tab again, and create a new layer. Hit Ctrl+Shift+I (Shortcut for Invert Selection), which will select all the black parts of the picture.
3. Change your foreground color to black, and use the flood-fill (or press Alt+Backspace) to fill the selected part of your new layer. This fills in all the areas that should be black with the foreground color... which is black.
4. Delete the background layer. De-select everything that you currently have selected, and you'll have some nice black & transparent line art on it's own layer, all by itself. Now it's easy to color your picture by simply adding layers behind this one!

Er... I think that's everything I can say on this subject ^^

 

have my babies!

<3

 

NO Shes MINE! lolz

anyway nice i am not that good at GFX but this will help a lot of ppl an i love your sig

 

Extremely nice, thanks a lot!

 

I don't know witch i like more your tutorials
or you lol Lets just go with both for now...
I cant wait for more tutorials by you..

 

nice tut! 10/10, even though i would never use it, cause i suck XP

 

"like" says TDS

that is very nice and I was wondering why they look like they were drawn yet the colors were impossible to do by hand. 14/10

Oh and you probaly started a new style for those who would slave hours upon hours to make stuff like this so yeh, good job.

 

tds, i don't fully understand your question on the colors being drawn by hand.

Do you mean the cyan color?

 

Very nice tut, Wendy. This should be stickied. =]

 

Really nice tutorial, your very artistic, good job.

 

wow... I love you?

 

Amazing guide!

If only I could make a decent sketch ...

 

no, no. What I meant was that most of your latest pics look like they are only hand drawn then scanned and thats it. I din;t realize how you would actually do the colors (like in ur sig) because it would be impossible to do them colors with pencils .

It ever get time (big IF), I might try your Tutorial and post my outcome

 

Ur my hero.

 

Wow, very nice

 

hehe wendy. ur god =D

 

*GoddESS

Anyone who has taken the time to try out the tut should post before and after pics. Also- feedback on the overall communication would be nice since I eventually plan on a color sequel.

 

These are both amazing drawings

Did you make the first one from scratch?

And where did you learn to draw like that ^.^

I will try this method as soon as i create a worthy sketch

 

You got talent + skill! thx im practiceing now

 

Nice tut helped me alot .