How to Convert a Sketch Into a Digital Drawing Using Photoshop

by WillMakesThings in Craft > Digital Graphics

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How to Convert a Sketch Into a Digital Drawing Using Photoshop

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Do you want to convert your physical sketch into a digital drawing?

To Convert one of your sketches into a digital Drawing you are going to need photoshop. (At least for this tutorial) and some way of drawing digitally, whether it's a touchscreen, drawing tablet, or even just a computer and mouse. It's not that bad, especially if you know the basics.

I am not extremely experienced with Photoshop, but through the things that I've done, I've learned a few things. i hope this tutorial will be of use to you.

Supplies

-Computer

-Photoshop

- Some way to draw digitally (Drawing Tablet, touchscreen, mouse) It's not necessary if you have a computer with a cursor, but it helps a lot. I personally use the Wacom Intuos Drawing Tablet.

- Paper and Pencil/Pen

- For this tutorial, I use a Windows Laptop, but you can do this with an Apple device too.

Making a Physical Drawing

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Draw whatever you want! On any Paper. It doesn't matter. I just drew a random shape for the sake of this tutorial.

Scan it with you phone or any modern device with a camera. You can download free apps to scan it in.

Uploading Your Scanned Drawing to Your Computer

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Here I just attached the image to an email on my phone and then emailed it to my self. On my laptop, I accessed my Gmail and downloaded it onto my computer.

Opening Your Photo in Photoshop

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First of all, make sure that Photoshop is installed. Next, go to your downloaded file, and press on "Show in Folder". This should bring you to the highlighted file in File Explorer. Right Click on the file and hover over open with... Then Press on Photoshop. It should open it as a new file in Photoshop.

Digitally Inking Your Drawing

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First, create a new layer by pressing on the small plus sign at the bottom right corner of Photoshop. Select this layer and then the brush tool on the left side of Photoshop. You can choose any color you want for the line art. I personally just chose black. I then traced over my lines while in the new layer.

Starting With the Coloring

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Once you are done with tracing the original lines. Right-click on the layer where you drew the outline and duplicate it. Name this new layer "Coloring". Click and drag the line layer over your coloring layer. This is to make it easier to color within the lines. It makes it so that the Line layer overlaps the Coloring layer. Then I equipped my bucket tool so that I could fill in my Drawing. I chose a nice shade of blue. I also re-selected my brush tool and added highlights.

Saving Your Work

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If you would like to save your work, go to File>Save As> Select JPEG to save it as an image. Make sure you have the original sketch not visible when saving. You can do this by erasing the background or by turning the background off. (Pressing the little eye next to the background layer.)

Enjoy Your Digitized Masterpiece!

Once it is saved, show it to your friends and family. I hope you learned something in this tutorial and it helped you. I am not a professional at Photoshop, but I hope I was able to give you some insight.