The Art of Chelsea Brown

Line work Tutorial - Introduction

This tutorial covers how to ink, scan, and clean up an image so it may be colored digitally.

Materials required for this tutorial:

Pencil (I prefer Staedler technical pencils: 0.5 lead)
Pen (I prefer Bic fine ballpoints, they're cheap, come in bulk, and work well for drawing and inking)
Eraser (kneaded erasers are always great, I also like Pentel click erasers)
Paper (I draw straight in my sketchbook: Strathmore Sketch recycled paper brand, or on cardstock)
A scanner (I use an hp psc 2175)
Photoshop (this tutorial is designed to work with CS2 but may be compatible with other versions)
A graphics tablet (Wacom is the best) is optional for this portion, but very useful

Section 1 - Sketching and Inking

The firs thing you'll need is a sketch. Make sure you do it in pencil. It doesn't matter how neat it is since you're going to ink over it and erase it later. Just make it as neat as you need it to be to know what lines you'll be inking over. Make sure you sketch light enough that you'll be able to completely erase the lines once you're finished inking.

Now it's time to ink! Select your favorite inking pens and carefully go over the lines you wish to keep. Inking left to right if you're right-handed, or right to left if you're left-handed might be a good idea to avoid smearing your lines. If you make a mistake, don't worry! You'll be able to fix it once we've scanned the drawing into Photoshop.

Once your inking is completely dry, you can erase your sketch. You may find there are small areas where you made mistakes. Again, don't worry, you'll fix this in a moment.

Section 2 - Scanning

Now it's time to scan in your drawing and prepare it for coloring. Once you've completely erased your sketch, scan the inked drawing into Photoshop. To do this, open Photoshop and go to File>Import and choose your scanner's name from the list.

Your scanner software should start and provide you with a preview of your scan (some scanners require you to click "Preview" or "Prescan" before the preview appears). Depending on your scanner brand and model, your window will probably look different from this, but all the basic functions should be available.

When scanning in any image to be used for digital art, always make sure you set the resolution to 300 dpi. Higher is okay but unnecessary unless you want the final image to be rather large. But never make it less than 300. Also if your scanning software has any auto-correct options for color, brightness, contrast or anything else of that sort, make sure they are turned off. It's always best to do the correcting manually in Photoshop later.

Section 3 - Cleaning up the Drawing

The image you've scanned in will probably look kind of faded, and the paper grain may be visible. There are some easy tricks to fix this. First, go to Image>Adjustments>Levels. The Levels box will pop open. This allows you to adjust the levels of black, white and grey in the image. You will see three eyedropper buttons in the bottom right corner. Click on the far right one (it should be white).

If you hover your cursor over your drawing, you'll notice it had changed to an eyedropper. Click on the darkest area of what is intended to be the white of the paper. In my image I chose this area:

Once you click there, you'll notice the white parts of the image will suddenly lighten. What you have done is told Photoshop what the lightest area of the image is supposed to be. Since we want everything but the lines to be white, we want even the darkest area of the paper around the lines to be pure white.

Now, this method may have not gotten rid of all the texture or darker areas on the paper. If any remain, you have two options, you can drag the white slider on the levels box to the left until they're all gone, or you can erase them manually. I usually do a combination of both. If you drag the light slider too far to the left, it will start to mess with your inked lines, and we don't want this. As you can see, I've only dragged it 8 points to the left. Only use the slider for large areas of paper darkness, not small smudges or eraser debris.

You'll also probably need to darken your lines slightly. Do this using the black level slider. You may have to pull the white and black sliders back and forth a bit until you find the right balance where the paper remains white but the lines remain dark and in-tact.

Be careful, if you pull either one too far, your lines will start becoming jagged and pixilated.

Now it's time to fix all those little mistakes and artifacts that have probably been annoying you up to this point. Zoom in on an area you wish to clean up and using the paintbrush tool with the color set to pure white, start painting away those mistakes. Only be as meticulous as you feel you need to.

When you're zoomed in that close, you're going to notice a lot of little errors, but remember, the tiny ones won't show up when you're zoomed back out again. Only fix the big ones that will be visible when the image is saved at its final size. Sometimes mistakes, stray lines, or a little paper texture can add some character to an image that overworked digital pieces sometimes lack.

Section 4 - Setting up an Inking Layer

When doing a digital piece, it's usually useful to have different elements of the piece on separate layers. I always like having my inks on their own layer and this becomes especially important if you plan on doing any manipulation to the lines later. If you just want to keep them black, you can copy the drawing onto a new layer above everything else and just set it to multiply.

However, it's often fun to do other effects to lines, such as coloring them. To do this, you'll need to have those lines not only on a separate layer, but also separated from the white background they're on. Believe it or not, there's an incredibly easy way to do this!

First, make sure your drawing is as clean as you'd like it to be. Anything that is not white is going to end up on this Lines layer. Now select the whole canvas by going to Select>All and then cut it (Edit>Cut). Your image should now be gone, leaving you with a pure white canvas. This will be your background layer, and is already named Background by default.

Next, create a new layer by going to Layer>New>Layer. When a box pops up, enter "Lines" as the layer title (or "Inks" or whatever you prefer).

Now fill this layer with black by going to Edit>Fill.

Next, click the Quick Mask button on your toolbar.

Now go to Edit>Paste. Your lines should appear, looking something like this:

Now go back to normal mode by clicking the button to the left of the Quick Mask button. You'll notice all of your lines will be suddenly selected.

Now, simply hit "Delete" on your keyboard or go to Edit>Clear. You can deselect the lines by going to Select>Deselect, and you'll notice you now have solid black lines on your new Lines layer.

If you hide the background layer you can see that the area around the lines is all transparent.

If you'd like, you can now crop the image to the size you want to work with. Sometimes it's a good idea to leave extra working space on the sides, but since this is just a tutorial image, I'm not going to worry about that.

Save the image as a PSD file. Time for color!

You can go back to the tutorials menu or go straight to the next step.

All content © 2007 Chelsea Brown