Digital Drawing Tutorial in Photoshop

 

For hundreds of years young artists learned to draw by studying with a master and copying his work.  Thanks to the digital age the work of the true masters of art from the Renaissance and the Baroque Golden age is available to us to work with and yes copy.  During this class we will be studying style and working in the style of the masters of art. For week one, line and drawing we will actually copy parts of these masterpieces.

Working in Layers in Adobe Photoshop

Step 1- set up a new Photoshop document.

1.       Start by opening Adobe and making a new file.

2.       Click the custom button.

3.       Name the file, ( I have L1 Layer Trace).

4.       If it says pixels - -change to inches, this is paper size 11x 8.5.

5.       Set the Color Mode to Grayscale for black and white drawing, and the background color is automatically white.

6.       Click Create.

Step 2

1.       Download the image of your choice from the lesson image folder.

2.       In Photoshop click file and find the image.  Most downloads are in your download folder.  I often change this to my desktop because it is easier to find it.

3.       Open desired image and click open.

Step 3

1.       Decide which part of the image you want to draw.

2.       Crop with crop tool and click checkmark

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Step 4

1.       In your layer panel Right Click and choose duplicate layer.

2.       In the layer document box choose the file that you named.

 

3.       If for some reason you can’t get the duplicate layer to work, it is also in the top menu under layer, which you can pull down to duplicate.

4.       The three choices are in this document, in a new document and in the document you named.

Step 5

1.       In your layer panel right click create smart object.

2.       This will allow you to resize and make it bigger without distortion.

Step 6

1.       Click and pull down edit to free transform.

2.       Resize the cropped document to fit your paper.

3.       Click he check mark to save it to the size.

Step 7

1.       Once again crop out extra white space.  Now we are ready to draw.

 

Step 8

1.       Click the plus layer tools at the bottom of Photoshop.  This is your tracing layer.

2.       Click the paintbrush to choose a usable brush.

Step 9

Window menu to brushes gives you all the brush choices.

 

Step 10

1.       Try the brushes until you find one that will duplicate the line type you want.

2.       Use the slidebar to choose the brush size.  You will need a small size for this lesson.

Step 11

Choose a color from the color swatches.  It needs to be different from black or white to show.

Zoom in by going to view and pull down to 100 or 200 Percent.

Step 12

1.       Choose the correct size brush and trace image changing brush sizes as needed.

2.       This drawing will take you 2-4 hours to complete.

Step 13

1.       Save image photoshop

2.       Choose file to export save for web to save a smaller document.

3.       Choose file to save as Photoshop document to keep a document that can be manipulated further.  I always do both.