Tutorial- Digital marker drawings using Adobe Photoshop

This is a quick tutorial on how to marker render your drawings digitally. It gives a professional and impressive look to your sketch schemes that tutors at University love...I know because they told me I should start adding marker colour to my sketches.

You could obviously buy a couple of marker pens from an art shop, print your drawing off and marker away.....but what if you make a mistake? What if the colour dont turn out the way you want after you just bought a pen that cost £5 each? Do it digitally and its easier, quicker and better.

Step 1. Scan your line drawing, plans, Sections, Perspectives, what ever into your computer. Make sure you scan it at a medium sort of DPI or resolution. If your not sure what that means dont worry!

Step 2. Once scanned, open it up in Adobe Photoshop. It should automatically be a background layer.

Step 3. Create a new layer and call it "Colour layer"

Step 4. Once this is done, go to the '0tool panel' select the 'brush tool' and change the setting to whichever one you prefer. I normally choose the 'oil paste' setting and then what ever size that fits accordingly to the sketch.
N.B Remember, your trying to mimic actually marker rendering your sketch in real life so you wouldnt try colouring a bit which is very small with a very large brush.

Step 5. Select a colour which you want to maker in. (Best options are light colours which are not as bold and in your face, as not to distract the attention away from the actual drawing).

Step 6 Once the colour is selected, fire away and brush over the area which you want coloured. Dont worry is it goes over the edge a little, thats the whole point to make it look like its done by hand and a bit, well sketchy!! IMPORTANT. Make sure you have selected the colour layer in the layers panel and not the background layer.

Step 7. Once your happy, select the layer "colour layer" and on the layer option drop down above, select the "Multiply" mode, which blends the colour to the background layer. It will all of a sudden look quite good!

Step 8. You can adjust the transparency with the slider to make the colour more or less faded!! This is a very useful tool!

Step 9. Still on the "colour layer" go to "filters>brush stroke>splatter". A new dialog bow will appear. Just click "ok". All of a sudden the brush strokes on the drawing have a bit of splatter on them, a more authentic look. (if it has changed dramatically, undo this step, start again but in the dialog box which appears change the settings accordingly).

Step 10. Repeat steps 1-9 for different colour or shades.

There you go, a nice and easy tutorial on how to colour you sketches on the computer.

Hope you like......cya

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended - Student Edition - Full

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended - Student Edition
Get all the features in Adobe® Photoshop® CS4 software - and much more. Whether you work in design, motion graphics, architecture, education, engineering, medicine, or scientific research, Photoshop CS4 Extended - Student Edition is the software for you. Paint directly on 3D models and access all the power of Photoshop for 3D editing and compositing. Experiment freely with nondestructive image adjustments. Composite images, text, and graphics. Work at peak efficiency in a streamlined and flexible interface. Edit motion graphics over multiple frames of imported video layers. And for accurate image analysis and visualization, take advantage of precise measurement, counting, and logging tools.

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