Digitizing Hand Drawn Sketches with Character

1. Introduction: Hey, guys. I'm Dylan Mierzwinski, graphic designer and selling enthusiast from Ann Arbor, Michigan. In this Skillshare class, I'll show you how to digitize your sketches in Photoshop while retaining the character of the hand-drawn line. This method works on any black ink sketches. Grab your pens and paper, launch Photoshop, and let's get started. 2. Your Class Project: The project you'll be creating for this class is an illustration inspired by the meaning behind your first name. Start by researching your name. My name Dylan is Welsh and translates to great tide. In Welsh mythology, Dylan was a god or a hero associated with the sea. I did some further research into Welsh culture and found that Welsh royalty is associated with a crown of three feathers. I also know that I'm named after Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas, so I did some research on them to. Use your new knowledge to create a word web. Just let your mind free associate. You never know when you'll make a fun connection that will spark a visual for you to sketch. You'll hopefully start gravitating towards the words that inspire you naturally. But if you're stuck, review your web for concrete terms that produce a visual and try combining some of those for sketching inspiration. I really liked the C theme and maybe tying the Dylan's into mine. Be sure to document your process. That's one of the best ways for students viewing your project to learn and connect. 3. Quick Mask Mode: Before we get into the full process, I just want to go over the Quick Mask Mode with you. This is what we'll be using to select and use our sketches. Quick Mask Mode is a tool to quickly edit selections using any selection or painting tool, and like any mask in Photoshop, black, white, and shades of gray are used to determine which part of the image is concealed or revealed. There are lots of ways to select things in Photoshop, but I think the Quick Mask Mode does the best job in this case of quickly selecting only the drawn line. If you take a look at these three sketches, which were all selected from their white background using different tools, you can see the Quick Mask Mode left behind the cleanest and boldest line. Furthermore, it does a better job but completely ignoring the white pixels. If I darken the background behind these sketches, you can see both the Magic Wand tool and color selection tool left white pixels behind, and did a poor job of keeping the line quality intact. I'm first going to show you how Quick Mask Mode is most commonly used which as you learned from the previous slides, is to quickly edit selections with various tools in Photoshop. You can see that I've got this picture of a flower and it is currently selected and I know that because I have the marching ants going around the perimeter. Let's say that for whatever reason I would want the selection to not include this yellow bud down here. I could just use the Lasso tool and subtract from the selection, but then I've got to be really careful about where my mouse is going, and so let's just say I'm really interested in using Quick Mask Mode. Well, in order to enter it, all I need to do is click on this icon that sits below the foreground and background icons, and it looks like a rectangle with a dotted circle on the middle, or you can go up to Select, Edit in Quick Mask Mode or the easiest way is just to hit "Q" on your keyboard. You'll know that it's active because the layer that you're working on is going to be the color of the mask, and you can also see that I've got a very bright red area on my document now. Just so that you know, let's say you were working on a picture that has a lot of red in it, and they're having a red mask is a little confusing. You can change the color of the mask by double-clicking on the Mask Mode icon and you can change the color. You can make it so that the mask is a little bit more translucent instead of totally solid, and you can also change whether the color indicates where the masked area is or whether it is indicating where the selected area is. I'm going to keep it to how I had it and go back into Quick Mask Mode. All I have to do is tell Photoshop what pixels to conceal and which to reveal. You can see that it automatically set my foreground color to black and white, and if I get a brush and start coloring, you'll see that black is going to conceal those pixels. If I switch my foreground by hitting X and bringing it to white, you can see that, that's going to bring those pixels back. I'm going to hit "Command Z" to go back to our original. All I would have to do to get rid of this bud is make sure that my brush has a color of black and go in here and color it out. Then once I have that how I like it, I can exit Quick Mask Mode and you can see that it has updated the selection to only be where I painted that out. That's how Quick Mask Mode is intended, but it's not totally how we're going to be using it. Instead, we're going to be using its ability to recognize black and white pixels and separate them as a way to separate our sketches from their background. You can see I have this little Photoshop bird drawing here and the background is one with the sketch, so they are altogether and that makes it useless for me to be able to use in Photoshop. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to use the Lasso tool to quickly and loosely select this. Since Photoshop is going to do the work, I don't have to worry about trying to get really close to where the sketches are, it's going to do everything for us. I've got that selected and I'm going to hit "Command or Control C" on my keyboard to copy it, and I'm going to go over to this document which is where I'll be working and building my illustration. Right now, all I have in the document is a color solid, and that is to set the background color, and I will make a new layer. Before we had our object already selected when we went into Quick Mask Mode. This time we're going to start out in Quick Mask Mode, and I'll do that by hitting Q on my keyboard and you can see that the layer is red to indicate that it's ready. All I have to do is paste now and you can see that it has already recognized with the mask that, "Hey, there are some black pixels here and they need to be separate from these white pixels." If I hit "Q" again to exit Quick Mask Mode you can see my sketches are selected. But if you'll remember from how masks work in Photoshop, black is actually being ignored. Really this selection just selected everything but my drawing, what that means is we need to inverse the selection. By the way, I could tell that because I have these marching ants now going around the perimeter of my document as well as where my lines are. To inverse that we can either go up to Select and hit "Inverse", or it's a great keyboard shortcuts to know which is Shift Command I or Shift Control I on a PC. Those marching ants that were around the document have disappeared, I've got my lines selected, and all that's left is to fill that selection. You could use a brush or you could use the Paint Bucket tool, but the easiest way to fill a selection with your foreground color which in this case is dark, is to just hit Option or Alt Delete on your keyboard. You can see that it automatically did that for me and I'll just hit "Command D" to deselect that. If I go to change my background color, you can see that I don't have that white in there, whereas if I were to just take this and copy and paste that as usual, you can see we still have that white. By doing it in Quick Mask Mode, it automatically separated those pixels for us, we're able to inverse the selection to only get the sketches and then we're able to fill it with our foreground color. Let me go through that process again in a little bit more of a streamlined way, so that when we're going through this process later, you already have that knowledge and it's not brand new and it's all coming at you at once. You can always rewatch this video a few times just to see the process. I know at first it seems like a lot of little keyboard shortcuts and a bunch of little steps, but once you do it a few times, your fingers are going to have the muscle memory and they'll be able to do it faster than you'll be able to think it, so it's really not too bad. Let me go ahead and delete this layer and make a new one since I know we'll be coming back, and I'll deselect this. I'm going to use the Lasso tool to just go over the parts that I want to take with me, and hit "Command C or Control C" on a PC. Go back to my working area, I've got my layer, I'm going to hit "Q" on my keyboard to make it active, and I can see my layer is red so it's good to go. I'm going to go ahead and paste. I'm happy with that, I got everything I wanted to. I'll hit "Q" to exit Quick Mask Mode. I can see that it has selected everything but my drawing because the marching ants are going around the side, so I can inverse the selection by hitting Shift Command I or Shift Control I on a PC. I can fill the selection by hitting Option Delete and that will fill it with my foreground color and then lastly, I just have to hit "Command D" to deselect that. Once again, we can see that I have cleanly selected those sketches and they are ready to be edited. 4. Sketching for Best Results: Since the Quick Mask Mode is using black and white to make the selection, you will want to ink over your sketches with a black pen if they aren't drawn in ink already, be sure to erase any pencil marks as gray pixels are going to turn into translucent pixels using Quick Mask Mode. That can be fun to experiment with eventually. But for now, we want clear black lines. Also, since we have the power of editing on our side since we're digitizing our sketches. You can sketch in variation. If you see here, I wasn't sure how I'd want my character's face to look at first, and the hair took me a few tries. But in Photoshop, I'll be able to select only the lines I want and work on the composition with all the options I drew while sketching. 5. Capturing Sketches: To capture your awesome sketches, you can either use a scanner, scanning it in at a minimum of 300 DPI in black and white, or you can simply snap a picture with your phone and email or AirDrop it to your computer, which is usually what I do. If you're taking multiple pictures, try to keep the phone the same distance away from each drawing, to ensure the lines have similar weights. For phone users, it's optional to use a photo editing app. I like Afterlight, to desaturate the picture and up the contrast and brightness. But I'll also show you how to make these adjustments in Photoshop. So I have my sketches here in Photoshop and I took this picture at night intentionally to show you that even if you have poor lighting on your sketches, as long as they're in focus, we're going to be able to edit them to get them ready to be used. So normally in Photoshop, you want to work in a non-destructive workflow, which means any edits that I make, I can then go back and change so that I don't box myself in or corner myself in. So normally the adjustments that we would want to do, we would want to make with an adjustment layer, which is this icon down here. I would want to go and adjust the levels in the hue and saturation that way. However, this is one of those circumstances where I know the edits I'm doing are what I want to apply to this. I'm not really worried about needing to go back and not having this. So I'm going to make the adjustments right to the layer. So first I'm going to desaturate these drawings and I'm going to do that by hitting Command or Control U on my keyboard. You can see this brings up the hue/saturation dialog box and I just want to drag the saturation slider all the way to the left. That's going to drop any of the color out of it and just leave us with black, white, and gray pixels. Next all I want to do is adjust the levels. So I'm going to hit Command L to bring up the levels dialog box and all I need to do here is I'm going to use this eyedropper, that's all the way to the right, that has the white in it and I'm going to select the background of my sketch. That's going to already start adjusting things. I just need to adjust it a little bit further. I want you to watch down here, where this background white isn't as white as up here. You can see there's some gray in there and as I drag this slider to the left, you can see that white starts evening out and all of that grain starts to disappear, which is what we want. Remember if we were to bring these sketches with all of these stuff in here and try and use it in Quick Mask mode, it's going to grab those as semi translucent pixels and it's just going to make the sketch really wonky to deal with. So we just want to make sure that that is fully white. Now you can see that since my drawing was lighter at the top and darker at the bottom, if I start to drag this too far, I'm starting to lose some definition in these lines. These ones down here look really nice where the picture was darker, but this is getting a little bit lighter. So what I like to do is I like to find a happy middle ground for the two. Then if there are any sections, I'm going to hit "Okay". Right down here that I think need little further adjusting, it's just a matter of using your Lasso tool to select where that is. So I'll go around these guys and hitting Command L again to bring up the levels and then just editing this further. So you can see that I was then able to edit just the selection and make those bright white. So that's all it takes to take your photos of your sketches and prep them for Quick Mask Mode. 6. Selecting and Cleaning Up: We have finished our sketching, we've cleaned up our sketches. They are in Photoshop and ready to go. We are ready to revisit our Quick Mask mode. What I want to do on, I should show you. I have my sketches here, but I also have a new document open. The new document is where we are going to be bringing all of our sketches and building our illustration. I usually start with something just generic enlarge because I'm not quite sure how the sketches are going to come over size-wise. Right now, I just started with an eight inch by eight inch board at 300 dpi, and that can always be changed with the crop tool. I also have a color solid here to set the background color. I've got a new layer ready to go. I'm going to go back to my sketches. Originally, I drew this bigger motif, but I know that I want something a little bit more simple. I know for sure that I'm taking my Dylan guard here. I'm going to go ahead and grab my lasso tool, and I'm going to loosely go around and grab the pieces that I know I want to bring with me. I'm just going to trace around, and there are some places like right here where she's sitting on this wave, it's okay if I take that line with me because I can clean it up in the next step. I've got her selected. I'm going to hit Command or Control C on my keyboard, and go to my new document. I will turn on Quick Mask mode by tapping Q, and I will check that it's on by checking the color of the layer. I'm going to go ahead and hit Paste. I am going to exit Quick Mask mode. I'm going to inverse the selection by hitting Shift-Command-I, and I'm going to fill the selection for someone to change my foreground color to something darker. I will fill my selection by hitting Option Delete. If you need a review of those steps, go ahead and go back to the video that we did earlier where I was showing you more drawn out how to go through that process. I've got my sketch in here. Now what I'd really like to do is clean this up. You can see that I was not as diligent of erasing pencil lines. Since I'm left-handed, I tend to smear my ink a little bit, so sometimes there's just no helping that. But luckily we're working in a digital space, so there's no problem with cleaning things up. I want to do this non-destructively like we were talking about earlier. I don't want to go in here and just start erasing pixels because if I accidentally mess up and I fly across the screen, I'm going to have to hit Command Z to get those back instead of just being able to bring them back with a mask. I'm going to use a mask down here beneath the Layers panel. I'm going to zoom in really close, and I'm just going to start using my brush to push some of these pixels back for places that I know need to be cleaned up. If there are any instances like there, where I cut into close to the line, I can just switch my mask color by hitting X on my keyboard and that will swap between the black and white. I have that sketch cleaned up how I want. I am going to go ahead and apply this layer mask. Now, there are some instances where you're just testing out, getting rid of some of the pixels, but you might want them later, I forgot some down here. If that's the case, then don't apply the layer mask right away because, like I said, we want to work in a non-destructive workflow. If you think there's any chance you're going to want to edit that mask again, then go ahead and duplicate the layer that you're working on by hitting Command or Control J, you can also right-click and go up to Duplicate. We're going to make a new folder called save and I can go ahead and drop that layer in there, collapse this, turn off the visibility and drop it beneath everything. That way, I always have a copy of it and I know it's down there. But for the one we're working on, I want to go ahead and apply this layer mask. That's just going to finalize all of those changes that I just made. Now, what we need to do is we need to break up this image. If I were going to color this and have everything that you see be the same color, then I don't need to break it up, but I do know that I'm going to want to color the crown separate from the hair, separate from the face. So we're just going to go in and start breaking this illustration down. I like to just use the plain lasso tool, but you can use any selection tool you want. It's just a matter of picking the pixels you want. For instance, I know that I want all these facial features except for the cheeks. Those are all going to stay black, I can already foresee that. I'm just going to go through here, and I'm going to make sure that I select all of that. I'm going to leave the cheeks out of it. Go and grab the lips, come back up. I'm going to hit Command X on my keyboard and instead of just pasting, I'm actually going to do a paste in place, which if you go up to Edit and go to Paste Special, you can see that's where that is. The keyboard shortcut is Shift-Command-V, or Shift Control V and I use that a lot, so that's really helpful to keep your illustration pieces in place. Now, my face is on a separate layer, and I can go ahead and name it face. Then what I like to do is turn it off so that I can see where I'm left in my illustration what I still need to cut out. Next, I'm going to go ahead and get this crown. When you're cutting something out that has a joint line here, you just want to be really careful that you're cutting it out in a way that's going to look nice. When we're out here, we can be a little loosey-goosey with the lasso tool because there aren't any pixels here that we're actually grabbing. But in here, I want to make sure to really stay close and keep that line how I want it to look, and same down here. I'm just going to make sure that I keep that clean, same over here. If you need to use the hand tool while you're in the middle of the lasso tool like I do right now, all I have to do is, while keeping everything held down, I just hold the space bar, and that's going to let me pan around my document, I'll let go and then it'll return back to the lasso tool. When you're zoomed in, if you need to move around, that's a handy tip. I'll just keep going around here until I have my crown. Hit Command X and Shift-Command-V, name it crown, and turn the layer off. I'm just going to keep doing that until my girl is totally broken down into all the pieces that I want. I just went through and finished breaking up my little illustration, and so all the various pieces that I think I might want to use. Now just to keep things out of the way while I do that for my other sketches, I'm just going to select all of those layers, and I'm going to hit Command G to make a group or Control G on a PC. I'm just going to name this Dylan. I'm going to turn it off just because I like to keep things clean while I'm still transferring all my sketches over. Then all we have to do is repeat the process. I would just go in here and figure out what I want next. I know that I want her sitting on the whale instead of sitting on the wave. I'll go in here. You can see there's a lot of lines here that I'm going to have to be cutting out, but it really doesn't take too long. That's really the nice thing about working in a digital space as you get to take these hand-drawn sketches that have so much character, and turn them into something really great. I'm going to make a new layer, hit Q, turn to Quick Mas, I'm going to paste, like Q again, Shift-Command-I to inverse the selection. Option Delete to fill it in Command D to deselect it. I'm going to do the same process. I want to make a mask to clean everything up because this one really was not very good about making clean. That's why it's so nice to take the time to clean up your sketches before you bring them into Photoshop because, although you can edit it, obviously this is all time that could have been saved if I was just a little bit neater. We'd want to go through and clean all these lines up with a mask. Once again, when I'm done with my layer mask, if I'm not sure that I want to keep it this way, I can go ahead and make a copy of it by hitting Command J and dragging it down into my safe folder. That way I've got a copy of that stuff down there. I'm going to go ahead and apply the layer mask. Then I can go in and break this down. This one is only two shapes that I need to separate. I'm probably not going to keep this lettering, but I will separate it from the whale just in case I want to use it, and so that I can edit the whale independently. Command X, Shift-Command-B, limit "Dylan" so I know it's text, name is a whale, group them together, name the group whale and turn it off. I'm just going to keep doing that until I've got all the sketches that I want. One tip I want to show you is, if you did end up bringing some lines in that you really like, but they ended up being too light, let's say that I really liked this cursive right here, you can see that it's not as bold and black as everything else. What you can do is bring it over into your document like you normally would with Quick Mask mode. Then what you can do is, you can continue to duplicate the layer and you'll see that that's going to add some darkness. I can go ahead and merge all of those layers together that I just duplicated by selecting them all, right-clicking and hitting Merge Layers. Now that's one shape that's a lot darker than what we brought over. That's a good tip to keep in mind. Once you've got all of your sketches in, you can then start playing around with your layout. You're going to want to have your layout finalized for the coloring phase, which is what's coming next. Clean up your sketches, bring them over to your document, get everything broken up into neat groups and labeled how you want it to be labeled, and finish that composition. Next up is coloring. 7. Coloring: All right, so by now you have brought in your sketches. You've separated them out, you've cleaned them up. They're all neatly in their own groups and your composition is finalized. You're ready to get to coloring these sketches and this is obviously a really fun part when the sketches start to come to life. I have a few different methods I like to color things in of how I like to color things in. So the first I'm going to show you, I'm going to go to the layer that has my feathers on it. Right now with my feathers layer selection. If I were to grab a brush and come over here and try and color this in, obviously, I'm just going to color all over the place. But Photoshop has this awesome button over here where we can lock the transparent pixels. So it's at the top of the Layers panel and it looks like a little checkerboard. When I click that, it does exactly what it says. All of the pixels on that layer that are transparent will not be able to be edited. Which means I can now take my brush and I can color over this without having to worry about getting my colors everywhere, so I can bring some pink, I can grab some red. Since I separated my layers, I can color over all of this without worrying about editing it. So that's why we took the time to be so smart with separating all of our layers out, and this is fun because you can almost start to get a little bit of a watercolor effect. If I zoom out, you can see it looks like we've got a lot of colors in there. I can do this for all of these that are on this layer. This is just a nice way to add a little bit of interesting effect. You don't have to know how to do watercolors. You don't have to be a master of color with colored pencils, you can just bring a blacking to sketch and then work on it in here. So sometimes if that's the effect I'm going for, then that is how I will work on it. However, if I wanted, let's say I just wanted these feathers to be blue. All of them just straight, light-blue. Well, if I want to change the color, it's a little bit annoying to have to go in, grab a brush and recolor over these each time. That's not very efficient. So if I know that I'm going to have something colored, just a solid color, then I'm going to use a solid adjustment layer. So I'll go back to my adjustment layers down here and right at the top you can see we have solid color. That's going to apply a color to the entire canvas and we'll keep it blue, that's fine. But we want to clip it just where the feathers are, so we're going to use a clipping mask. In order to do that, we just have to make sure that our color is right on top of the layer that we're wanting to color and then I can go ahead and hit option on my keyboard. Do you see how my cursor changed from a little hand to a square with an arrow? That's saying, "Hey, you're about to apply a clipping mask to these two layers," which we want to do. Now, you'll see that that blue that was once taking up the whole canvas is now only appearing on the pixels of the layer that we clipped the color to. So you can see all of my feathers are blue here. So now if I want to edit that color instead of having a color over them, all I have to do is double-click on this solid adjustment layer and click around and change my color, and they're all changed on the fly. So obviously that is a great way to edit really quickly. Now I could technically go in and add a solid adjustment layer clipping mask to every single layer if I wanted to. But if you are illustrating things and you know some things are going to be the same color, it makes more sense to apply the clipping mask to a group. So for instance, I have these three stars here, and I know that I want all of them to be the same color. I can go ahead and make sure that I put the solid color adjustment layer right above that entire group. You can see it's right above this whole group and apply the clipping mask then. Now you can see that that color has applied to every pixel within that group on all those layers. So if I want to change those, it's just a matter of going in and clicking once and all of those colors are updated. So that's nice because then you can really start to organize how your illustration is set up and therefore how it will be edited. So right now you can see that I have my illustration broken down into the actual parts of the illustrations. So the Whale is separate from Dylan, which is separate from the stars, which is separate from the bubbles. However, as I'm going through and coloring, I might find that the crown, the stars, and the trident are all going to be the same color. So instead of keeping them within their groups, I'll probably take those layers out and regroup them by the color that they're going to be assigned to. That's just going to streamline things a bit. So just keep in mind that you might have to readjust and reorganize your layers panel as you're going through and adding color to things. So those are the two ways that I colored the actual drawn lines. But sometimes in my illustration I want a solid area. So for instance, with these stars, I liked the little faces that they have. Like I like these little eyes, but I actually want the body of the star and the outline to be one color. You can also see that since this is just an outline that line that is on the whale here is showing through there and that's not really ideal. So what I like to do when I want a fill area is, first I want to separate these eyes from the star. So I didn't do that earlier because I didn't realize I would want to do that. I'm just going to separate that onto its own layer. Now what I want to do is I want to put a new layer behind this star. The reason is even though I want this area to be filled, I still want the character of this hand-drawn line to be showing through. So I still want to hold on to that. I just want to make sure that I have a layer behind it so that I can work on the fill. So you can use whatever tool you want. You can use a lasso tool or the Pen tool or you could even just use a brush and color in where you need it to be colored. But essentially, I'm going to go right down the middle of my drawn line because I want that drawn line, like I said, the edge to still show because I like the texture. But I want to make sure that my fill gets all of these pixels in here and doesn't leave any white behind. So I'll go ahead and go in there. I will fill it by hitting option delete. Now what I can do is I can take my fill layer and my outline layer, and I can put them in a group together. Then I can apply the clipping mask to that whole group. So add a solid color, pick my color, and add a clipping mask. Now you can see that it looks like that shape is one full solid and you can see that I have got some cleanup work to do. I didn't grab all these pixels in here. But now we're able to have a solid filled-in shape while still having it look hand-drawn thanks to that outline that is on there. So between coloring the lines with multiple colors using the lock transparent pixels function or just using a clipping mask on the layers or creating fills, gives us a lot of options for coloring in our sketches. So take some time to experiment with all of that. Play around with adding things into groups and adding clipping masks there, and doing fills and maybe trying and coloring some of the layers on some of the lines with multi colors. Have fun with it. You'll never know what effects you can come up with until you try. So have fun, try and stay organized and the next step is texturizing. 8. Texture: Here we are at the last stage of making our illustration and that is to add in a little bit more texture. Now for the most part, I'm really happy with the texture that the hand-drawn line offers and you can leave it as is. But there are some places, especially with some of the black lines where I just like to exaggerate the effect a little bit. To do that, we're going to use filters. I'm going to be working off of this layer that has my hair and arms on it. Instead of just adding filters right to it, I'm going to convert it to a Smart Object by right-clicking on the Layer and going to Convert to Smart Object. This is just another way to work non-destructively in our workflow by changing it to or converting it to a Smart Object. Any filters that I add to this, I'll be able to re-edit again and again as needed. So now that it's a Smart Object, I'm going to go up to filter. I'm going to go to Distort and I'm going to go to Ripple. Now ripple is literally just going to ripple all the pixels that we have. But to show you how it's going to work, I'm going to crank this up really high. Obviously that is not the ideal effect that I'm looking for but it shows you what's happening with this filter on. I can double-click in here. Let me show you this in the filter section where I converted this to a Smart Object. You can see I now have this smart filters addition here and I can just double-click on ripple to open it back up. What I want to do is I want to change the size to small. I want to dial this back quite a bit. We'll see how that looks. If I toggle the smart filters on and off, you can see that I am getting quite a difference in there. It is rippling it just enough. If you are finding that when you're doing this, your ripples are getting too jagged. You can go into Filter >Noise> Median and set it to 123 pixels and hit Okay. That's just going to smooth those jagged lines out. Now if I filter this on and off, you can see that I was able to just add to that hand-drawn look a little bit on those black lines. Sometimes I'll go through and do that to various spots. I think the crown and the feathers look nice but maybe the trident and definitely this whale could use some rippling to make it look a little bit more hand-drawn. Another thing I like to do is utilize these brushes that this artist named Kyle T. Webster made. If I go into my brush presets here and drop down, you can see I've got a ton of these in here. Basically what they are is Kyle is a Photoshop artist who has made a bunch of brushes that act like real mediums would in real life. Right now I have one of his oil pastel brushes. You can see that the effect that I'm getting there is very close to real life, how you would expect an oil pastel to work. It's really incredible to merge classic art with a digital space. Not only do his brushes do a great job of doing that but he has kept the prices on them very low. I think that you can get the full mega pack now for about $15. If you really like this effect that I'm about to show you then it's a great investment to make. I'm going to do this on my whale layer. Actually, whenever I make my brush strokes, I always like to put them on a separate layer so that I don't destroy the layer I'm working on. But I want to work within the confines of this whale shape. I am just going to select my whale layer and then I'm going to Add a New Layer so that I can just work within that selection. As you can see, he's got so many brushes. It's really just learning curve of going in and playing around and trial and error and figuring out what you like. But one that I come back to a lot is from his ink box and it's called spattered punk. What I'm going to do is set the color just a little bit darker than the whale. I'm going to get in here. You can see that as I get in here and draw, I'm just getting a really nice non-uniform spatter. That's the key, right? Because we don't want our art to look fully digital. The whole point is so that it can look hand-drawn. These brushes are just really smart and with a few strokes, I'm able to get in there and add that texture that I like. This can be really fun. Another way I like to use it is to add a layer right at the top of my document and set my brush color to that of my document background and just go over and make it look like some of the ink was lifted here as if it were really printed. You can see that just a few strokes and all of that texture that I added in is really effective. I highly recommend those brushes. The last tip that I have for adding texture to your documents is a bit of a cheater because I didn't actually learn how to do this until I took Jamie Bartlett's misprints Skillshare class. She showed us how to make this speckle texture using smart filters in Photoshop. I just think that it is the perfect touch of vintage grain and just a little bit of spatters and dots and speckles. I think I've added it to like every document I've worked on since I learned how to do it. As much as I would love to take you through the steps of how to create this. I really suggest you take Jamie Bartlett's class because not only does she understand how these smart filters work much better than I do but since that's where I learned it, I feel like it's only fair to funnel the class to over to her because she really is the one that knows how to do it. If you like the way that that looks, I would absolutely recommend taking her misprint class. But really when it comes to texturizing these illustrations, that's all that I do. I add a little bit of rippling to some of the lines. I use some of Kyle T. Webster's brushes to add a little bit more texture. Then I use what I learned in Jamie Bartlett's Skillshare class to add in some speckles. 9. Thanks!: Thank you for taking this course. I hope you guys enjoyed learning how to use the Quick Mask mode to select and capture your hand-drawn lines while keeping all the character intact. Don't forget to document your process and share it in your project for the community to see.