Digitally Illustrating from Sketch

To start turning my sketch into a digital illustration I first used a fine liner pen and thickened out all the important lines in the picture in order to create a sharper solid image that the computer could use to create digital outlines. The scanner would also pick up on darker tones better than lighter pencil sketch marks.

The image was scanned in and then using Photoshop I used a combination of the magic wand and threshold tool to seperate the black outlines from the white background, creating a hollowed out image that could be digitially coloured underneath. I also played around with the levels in order to make the image a little bit crisper - e.g.- contrast levels.

Some parts of the illustration I thought were badly drawn so I redrew several buildings and re-scanned the image. Using Photoshop I was able to erase the old drawings and replace them with the updated parts using a combination of the eraser tool and threshold tool that I'd used before. As the new parts were the same style and size it was easy to incorporate them into the overall design using a few Photoshop tools.

Colouring the image was done manually using the paint brush tool in Photoshop. Each object in the illustration was coloured on a seperate layer, which when presented together gives the effect the colour is filled into the black outlines. To maintain the hand-drawn look of the illustration I was going for I painted using a brush at about 70-80% hardness and left in little imperfections which mimicked the hand-drawn style of the lines. So in some areas the colour goes over the line or doesn't quit fill up, or colours overlap. Again, I wanted the illustration to have a more playful personal feel about it, like a world imagined inside someones head.

I also used the eraser tool to clean up some of the areas that had rough pencil marks obscuring the colour. This was allow me to colour more effectively but these pencil marks would be included at a later stage.

For the final touch I duplicated the original outlines, increased the sharpness by adjusting the threshold settings (so that more pencil lines from the scanned image came through) and overlaid that back onto the fully rendered illustration. This thickened out some of the outlines even more and brought back some of the finer details (e.g. - the river waves) that were lost during the clean up. I felt these pencil lines added a bit more charm to the image and overall made for a really aesthetically pleasing illustration.