Weddingbee Blog

…In my last post I promised to show you how to cheat a hand-drawn illustration.

So, for your viewing pleasure here is the tutorial using a sunflower as an example (please excuse the crumby cell phone pics):

How to Cheat a Hand-Drawn Illustration:

Supplies:

• Computer
• Printed Image (need a printer)
• Paper
• Fine tip Sharpie (or other felt tip pen that will bleed through paper)
• Scanner
• Photo-editing software

Step 1: Find a photo of the image you would like to draw. Scale it down so it prints to a size you want to use.

Step 2: Print said image (it doesn’t have to be color).

Step 3: Get your Sharpie ready (or other fine tipped pen that will bleed through the paper)

Step 4: Trace the major lines of the image. It’s a good idea to include the fine lines too so you know where to add shading (aka lots o’ dots).

Step 5: Flip your paper over. You should see faint lines where your tracing has bleed through.

Step 6: Re-trace over the lines with your Sharpie. Using your best judgment shade different parts with a series of dots and darkened areas. This part does take a little more intuition; if you are worried about messing up draw the shading with pencil first then go over again with the Sharpie (I haven’t tried this, but I am sure it would be fine).

Ahhhh….progress

Step 7: Admire your work

Step 8: You now have a “hand-drawn” illustration of your choosing. You can scan this into your computer and with some fine editing it can be saved as a vector for use in your projects. Keep in mind this is the mirror image of the initial photo so you may want to flip it in a photo-editing program. You could also make a copy of the image first so when you scan you will have more of a “true-white” as a background.

Step 9: Play with your drawing on your computer.

Here is an example of what you can do with your “drawing” using a little help from Photoshop:

It only took me about 10 minutes to “draw” this flower from start to finish.

The time-consuming part came in with the computer editing. It’s my guess that the less detailed the drawing you have the easier it will be to extract and save it as a vector. It is also probably dependent on how you plan to use your drawing.

In the peony example I wanted to only have lines with the background empty, and this meant I needed to go in and remove the “white space”. This was somewhat time consuming, but well worth it. I now have a peony vector to use in any project. (I am no graphic designer so I may be using the wrong term. I always forget what the difference is between raster/vector.)

What do think? Easy-peasy, right?

Let me know if you have any questions.