Retouching Your Drawings!

By [Caelicorn]



Helpful Reading
Layering in Photoshop ( http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/farp/berkeleylayer/berkeleylayer.html )
Useful tute for getting to know Photoshop (http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/farp/berkeleypaps/berkeleypaps.html)

Intro
The great thing about digitally colouring graphite images, is that most of the time all of the groundwork has been laid out. This means that you don't have to fuss over the intricacies of which shade of what hue to pick in order to colour light/dark variations in your pictures, or hair, for example. The downside of this method is that your pencil drawing (or pen drawing, or whatever, this works for any image along these lines) must be up to par or else you're going to be filling in loads of empty spaces that end up looking kinda bad.

I'm going to assume that you understand the basic functions of your digital program, and that your drawings are pretty neat :). Otherwise, check out the helpful tutorials that I have listed, to get yourself familliar with the concepts of layers, smudge brushes etc. Hopefully at the end of this, you'll be able to post your own images, and if you want me to help out with anything, just query me then.

Hmm..Usually when I retouch an image, I use the smudge brush in a variety of sizes, a soften tool, an airbrush, and many many layers. Layers are awesome, they can save you so much time in so many ways!

In order to show you my particular colouring techniques, I had to find a graphite image I had done. It has been such a long time since I've used this technique, so bear with me :) I had to choose a very old drawing, the only one I still have on my hard-drive, so it's a little embarrassing :P

Try not to look to hard! Eww!



I did this as a rush job perhaps seven years ago? That is how old he is :) I have lost the reference image, infact. At any rate, there are many areas that need to be smoothed over here in order to make him more realistic. All the grainy parts need to be ironed out. Anatomically, he's fairly all right, so I don't need to change much here.

If you find you need to alter the anatomy of your figure etc, you will need to paint over it, but there are tricks to keeping the textures consistent, that I shall show you.

Retouching Drawings Part 2

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Retouching Drawings Part 3
Retouching Drawings Part 4
Retouching Drawings Part 5
Retouching Drawings Part 6
Retouching Drawings Part 7