cleaning up line art in photoshop illustrator

Hello friends! Today I would like to share with you lot how to clean up line art drawings using Photoshop and Illustrator.

Smoothing out your line art is especially important if you lot are selling artwork printed on shirts and other products through Impress on Demand shop s similarRedbubble, Zazzle, Society6, etc.

This is merely one of many ways I create designs, and a technique yous tin can utilize toplough black and white drawings into digital line art — which you lot tin can and so use any way you choose.

How to Make clean up Line Art using Photoshop and Illustrator

  •  Offset out with some ideas in your sketchbook, and make a curt list of designs to try drawing.  I often look online for inspiration and have a few things in mind before I get started.
sketchbook
  • In one case yous have a design you like, re-draw it lightly on a make clean page in pencil.
  • Go over the pencil cartoon with a black Sharpie or another fine blackness ink pen, to get something like this:
sketches black and white
  • Make sure you erase all pencil lines.
  • Browse each blueprint separately into Photoshop.
line drawing in photoshop
  • Make clean upward the image equally much as possible using tools such as desaturate, Brightness/Contrast, Curves, and erase to clean up any little blackness dots or grit $.25 that are showing.
  • You can too employ the color choice tool to select the blackness line only, then create a new layer and fill it in with black. Once I am finished with this step, I save the file equally a .PSD.
  • Next open the .PSD file in Illustrator, and use the Live Trace or Image Trace tool to turn your design into a nice smooth vector image. This is a great tutorial on using Live Trace in Illustrator that I oft follow.
live trace in illustrator
  • The upshot of this procedure is that you get much smoother lines. This is important if yous are having the designs printed, especially in large sizes.
  • Save the image equally a .AI file.
  • Open up the file in Photoshop and prepare the pixel size to something large, like ten,000 x 10,000 pixels.
  • Fill up or colour your line drawing however you like.  I similar to utilize layers, make full with gradients and applylayer settings (ex. Screen) or merely paint on some other layer using a drawing tablet.There is basically an endless variety of means you can use your line art.
  • Salvage your finished blueprint as the right file type and size(s) for the POD site you are creating for. I ever salve a .PSD file as well (with all my layers in tact) and so I tin can open information technology once again later and utilise the aforementioned design multiple times.

Here are some examples of work that I have used this technique for:

tangled black and white yin yang mandala live trace illustrator
pot head teapot live trace illustrator tutorial

And there yous have it!  Hopefully you now take a little bit of insight into how I create my designs for sale, and maybe fifty-fifty learned a new technique to endeavour out for yourself.

Feel gratuitous to leave any questions or comments about this process in the comments section below.

Have a dandy week everyone!

Cheers,

Julie