How to turn sketchs into quailty line drawings.

benarent — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 10:01:53 +0000

In this quick how-to, I will go over how I turn hand drawn product design sketches into high quality line drawings. Below isn’t the best of my drawing skills, (its a range of thumbnail concepts, but we are focusing on the scan.)

Jump in to find out !

Step 1. Get the Right Pencil!

Getting the right pencil is vital. My number one tip is use a COLOUR pencil, not a graphite pencil! The reason for this is because graphite easy smudges. Plus color pencils give a much better range of color, (from light to dark). At the moment I’m using the excellent Prismacolor pencil, that just feels right to me. To be exact I’m using Prismacolor Col-Erase 20045 Carmine Red.

The plus is that you can also erase as well!

Step 2. Draw!

Try to use different line weights, and explore lots of shapes. Use the arc of your arm to get a clean line, and rotate the paper to help your drawings.

Step 3. Scan, and Then set your Levels!

I use a Canon Lide 25 Colour Flatbed Scanner to do my scanning, its only £33 and doesn’t take up much room. The default setting it to Auto-Mask and Auto-Colour, turn all of this stuff off as we are going to be sorting this all out in Adobe Photoshop CS3 (PC).

Set the levels to the below, all you are trying to do is make your darkest point the darkest point, which pulling in the really bright bits of your brightest bits.

Step 4. (not always needed ) Remove that ‘blue’ paper like tinge!

I always find that I have a paper colour come though on my scans, this always effects my levels, So I often just select my background with the replace color tool and make this selections lightness 100. As we sketched in a colour pen, (not blue) the lines that we drew won’t be affected.

Step 5. Turn it B&W.

In this example I used a Green Pencil, so all you need to do is slide the Green slider to -200 to -170. As we used a green or red pencil, it won’t make any of the blue – black (that is picked up from the scan). If you had quite a ‘blue hue’ to your scan, make the Blues and Cyans up to 40- 20 %.

Step 6. Clean Line.

You should now have some nice clean lines, I normally erase any unwanted lines just to clean it up but it depends on what you are using the sketches for.

I also recommend drawing sketches 2 times as large as needed, then make them smaller in Photoshop, this will give you sketches a load more detial.

Bonus Step! Create a Action, and Batch Process your sketches.

Lastly, I when doing this I would recored a Action (for each color) and use this with photoshops batch processing tool.

Design Sketching – Inspiring sketches from the Umea.

benarent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:05:31 +0000

I have had this book over two years now, and would highly recommend it. Design Sketching is a extensive selection of inspiring sketches by 24 students at the Umea Institue of Design. The book has been compiled by Erik Olofsson and Klara Sjolen. Although you can only buy this book from the www.designsketching.com .

On a side note, Erik Olofsson one of the editors has also released a new book. Called Sketching: Drawing Techniques for Product Designers. I havn’t got my hands on it yet but it look like these are the sort of books product designers need.

Chinese Industial Design Site.

benarent — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 13:02:30 +0000

On my bouncing around the internet I found this VisoinUnion. They posted my energy Tree, It is only avaible in chinese but you can translate it in Google.

I came across some great resource for design sketching.

I would also highly recommend this book..

Sketching: Drawing Techniques for Product Designers

How to Sketch a MP3 Player.

Sketch Rendering.
A Awesome Photoshop Tut.

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