by Marci Miller
How to create beautiful line art using the pen tool in Photoshop. For those of us who strive for that perfect look and feel to our digital line artwork, this “how to” is for you! All you need is Adobe Photoshop (any version that has that pen tool), tons of time to burn and a warehouse of patience. Remember, all good things are awarded in time! Let’s start shall we? Okay, so here we have an example of one of my older pencil sketches. This guy is named Dain, he seems like such a people person type doesn’t he? Just check out that smile…
Step One – Scanning your image
First step is to scan in some of your original artwork, like I have done here. That way we have something to work with. Once you have your artwork scanned in, open this document in Photoshop.
You can either chose to “Open” it and use the original document, or select the image and drag it into an entirely new Photoshop document.
The choice is yours!
Step Two – Converting to Cyan
Now that we have our document opened and ready, we now need to convert it to a different color. One method is by adjusting the hue and saturation of the picture.
There are two ways to do this:
– Go to the drop down menu called “Layer” > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation
– Click the half circle button (it’s a circle that is half black & half white) at the bottom of the layers/channels/paths window.
* The color doesn’t necessarily have to be a blue, it just has to be any color other then black so you can easily identify which lines are the pen tool lines and which are the penciled lines. Blue is just my personal preference and what most tutorials will tell you to use.
Step Three – Using the Pen Tool
Alright now that we have hue/saturation taken care of, we need to add a new layer above our artwork layer so that we can start using that pen tool.
– Go to Layer > New > Layer
or you can use the short cut keys: Shift + Ctrl + N
– Select the pen tool in the tool box (first column, 9th tool down)
or hit “P” for Pen.
*I recommend drawing out a few curves first before starting out; this is just so you can get the hang of the pen tool. It takes some getting use to, but its fun with practice. Here I have laid out some examples of pen tool curves for reference.
Step Four – Drawing the line
Oh here comes the fun part, bet you can guess what we do next…
Now we have to carefully trace the original lines of the artwork using the pen tool. (I did say that this was a time consuming job!)
*As a tip, try and draw over the line work in medium portions. The longer the line continues, the better the line looks once you fill it in with paint. Lines that are too short end up looking bulgy, especially when trying to draw a short curved line.
It doesn’t matter if the pen line isn’t exactly spot on the pencil line. Once you find a point to stop at, you can hold down Ctrl to convert the pen cursor into an arrow cursor that you can use to move a section of the line around with. You can also use it to move a handle around to change the curve of the line.
If you find that you do not like a certain curve you made, holding down Alt and clicking one of the curve’s end points (also known as an “anchor points”) can collapse the curve. Using the Alt key, turns the cursor into a “^” which can also be used to re-curve a line from certain handle.
Step Five – Brush Pressure
Okay! So now you’ve drawn the perfect line and it fits exactly to the pencil line you wanted to trace over right? Well next step now is to Right + Click over it using your mouse.
– This gives you a menu box.
– Scroll down and select the option that says “Stroke Path…”
– This should open a dialogue box with a small pull down menu of options to stroke the path with.
– Choose the “Brush” option and check off the option that says “Stimulate Pressure”.
This gives the line the natural looking thick-to-thin stroke that you would achieve with drawing by hand.
*Note: Make sure that the color swatches at the bottom of the tool box are set to default black & white. If not, hit “D” for default and make sure the black square is on top of the white square.
Also, before you Stroke the Path, make sure that your brush tool is set to the size you want. I tend to have my point size at either size 3 or lower, for a thinner looking line.
Step Six – Keep at it!
Don’t be too surprised if you find that you have to make a lot of choices on where to lay down a line as you go along. If you’re an artist like me, you tend to make a lot of sketchy little lines in your picture so sometimes you have to make a decision on what line(s) to follow along when tracing over.
You might also have to apply another stroke over a previous line or a section of a line, because sometimes the lines the pen tool create end up fading in areas that you don’t want.
Remember, like any digital work you do: SAVE OFTEN!! This is very important. Just in case the program decides to crash on you or suddenly there’s a power outage…Don’t laugh, that actually happened to me once…!
Congratulations! You made the first line my friend. Now all you have to do is repeat these steps and continue along the rest of the picture.
Well I never said it was the quickest method to line art, but it is very effective for people who don’t have Illustrator or a Tablet Pen and all you hard work definitely pays off once you finish your work. Just look how clean and beautiful the work looks when it’s all done!
~Marci Miller aka Nobuko