How To Digitize Watercolor Artwork

1. Introduction and Class Project: Hi, I'm Nicky. I'm an artist and educator. And in this class I'm going to show you how to digitize your watercolor artwork. This is near and dear to my heart because when I first started my business, this was something that really kept me away from getting to the next level. I was terrified of digitizing my artwork. I remember Googling it and there was no information on how to digitize your artwork. This is probably four or five years ago. Once I learned how to do it, I was able to upload all my business a lot because I was able to offer a lot of different products. I'll show you guys a couple of examples. My art prints are a huge thing for me. I sell them in my Etsy shop and I digitize my watercolor artwork and then I put them on these and print them. Something else is my stationary lines. So all of my cards, I would not be able to sell these unless I knew how to digitize my artwork. And then lastly is something I'm really excited about. And these aren't the only things that you'll do with your artwork. But just a couple of examples is pattern design. I just got this printed. It looks upside down. But pattern design is another thing that you can do when you're able to your artwork. Super, super important skill to have. And I'm going to show you guys how to do that today. This is a simple class, really straightforward. I'm going to start off by showing you how to digitize something that is really simple to digitize with high contrast. Then a landscape piece where you've painted everything on the paper and you don't really need to remove the background. And then lastly, I'm going to show you a little more complicated when there's really light colors being used. How to remove the background for that, the class project is going to be you're digitizing watercolor artwork. I highly, highly, highly recommend that you digitize along with me or you do practice afterwards, because if you don't, that knowledge will just slip away. The best way to really embed it into your brain is to practice it. I've provided a couple of scans if you guys want to use those to digitize. But I recommend using your own artwork, but if you don't have that on hand, you can totally use the scans that I provide. The only thing that I want to mention is that artwork is my artwork that is copyrighted. So you can't sell it at all, but you can totally use it for personal use and for the project for this class. Alright, let's get started. 2. Digitizing Full Bleed Artwork: In our first lesson, I'm going to show you how to digitize something that is full bleed, meaning you painted the entire piece. There's paint all over it and you don't necessarily need to remove the background, but you do need to digitize it so that you're able to sell it as an art print or on stationary. The first thing you're going to need to do is to scan your items. Now, sometimes it'll fit completely in the scanner bed and sometimes it won't. Obviously, it's easy if it fits in the scanner bed, you just easily scan it. But I want to show you what to do in case your piece is larger than your scanner bed if you're not taking a photo of it. So what I've done is I have put my artwork, half of it on the scanner bed. And I'm going to scan this one and make sure you're following along with the guidelines that I explained in the previous video, you want to make sure that your scan is at least 300 DPI, That's dots per inch. And then if you, if your scanner allows, you can adjust the brightness or the contrast, contrast gamma. So we've got our first scan, and that is wonderful. I'm just going to drag it to my desktop. What I'm going to do is I'm going to be very carefully moving my artwork on my scanner. So what I'm doing is just gliding it over. So I'm getting the exact It's in the same spot but I'm just moving it over so you can get the rest of the artwork, so make sure it's perfectly lined up and your scanner. This ensures that it'll be easy for Photoshop to automatically combine the images. This looks great. I'm going to scan it. It doesn't matter if there's some overlap in your painting photoshop will be able to detect that. You just want to make sure that you, that both of the images have completely incorporated everything in the painting. Now what we're going to do is we are going to open Photoshop. Andrew going to go up to File Automate Photo Merge. And I'm going to go to Browse. And I'm going to get those two images. Now what I'm doing is I'm holding down Shift. Again, I'm on a Mac holding down Shift so I can click both of them, select them, hit Open. Photoshop is going to do, is it's going to combine these two images and line them up perfectly. And it's able to do this because we perfectly had them lined up in the scanner. So it's not like I turned one of them or anything like that. I just simply dragged the other half through so it could be scanned. This looks fantastic. Photoshop has done the work to put this together. And now what I need to do is I'm just going to go ahead and merge these two layers because they look gray. I'm going to relabel this artwork. You don't have to relabel things, but I do find it to be a little bit helpful and it just looks better. Now I'm going to take this layer and I'm going to hover over the plus sign. So it's duplicating the artwork. And then I'm just going to label this original artwork. The reason I do this is if for some reason I really messed this up with color correction or cropping it funky. I still have my original down here so I don't have to worry about it. I'm going to unclick it so we don't see it. It's just there as a precaution. And now we have the artwork. One thing I want to mention when you're painting, make sure you're painting at the dimensions that you want the final product to be. This is actually something I messed up on when I did that because I wanted this to fit on an eight by ten, but I painted it at a nine by 12 and those dimensions don't match. So what happened was I had to come in here, and this is actually a product in my Etsy shop, but I had to basically like refill this area by cutting and pasting and it was a half job. So just a word to the wise. Makes sure your painting at the dimensions that you're going to have the final products via. Alright, here's our artwork. It's scanned in. Now is the time if you see any little funky things, you can change them. I'm actually super happy with the color here. Don't worry, I'm going to show you in the next lesson how to color, correct, if you need to do that, but the color looks amazing, so I'm really happy with it. It looks just like the original, but I do see some pencil marks in here and a couple little things that I want to change, making sure that your layer is selected. Come over here to the healing tool. Click it. And then I'm just going to literally click and drag. And it gets rid of these things. There's any spots on your artwork like this down here. Sometimes things just drip and get a little messy. I recommend cleaning them up. You will see stuff like this when you print them. If you are printing them out like an eight by ten, I can see a lot of pencil marks in here. Again, this is the spot healing tool and I'm just clicking and dragging. And it's just cleaning them up a bit. Doesn't have to be perfect. Like this line right here. Isn't it nice when it does? But you have to be careful because if you get too close to this other line, it's going to erase it, or it can bring this line over here because basically what this tool does is or not basically, what this tool does is it detects the pixels around the area that you click in and just replaces that with those pixels. Really great tool, I love it. That's your spot healing tool. And that's the only one I really used for something like this unless I need to adjust the color. Now what I'm going to do is grab my Marquee tool. And I am clicking and holding down. And just all the artwork. I want it to be inside of this. I don't want to get this. You can tell the paper is down here on the bottom. I don't want that. I just want my artwork. Then I'm going to release right-click layer via cut. And as you can see, it has cut my artwork away from that original scan paper and I can just delete that because I don't need it. There. You have it. You have your art work already to I mean, it's digitized, it's full bleed. You don't really need to edit anymore. Come up here to File Export. I export as a PNG. If you export, since this is a full bleed piece, you could export as a JPEG. But I liked doing a PNG because then you don't get any background at all if it decides that you should have white back here or something like that. So PNG is my favorite way to export, and that's how you digitize a full bleed piece. 3. Digitizing High Contrast Artwork: Alright, next on our list is digitizing something that is high contrast. Now this is going to be, in my opinion, I mean, it was pretty easy to do the full bleed one. But in my opinion, this is one of the easiest ways, are easiest things to digitize because the paper is so white compared to the green of the palm leaves. A lot of artists prefer to paint in high contrast like this because they don't want to go through the hard work of digitizing when things are lighter. I actually took a class recently on pattern design and the artists told us that she recommends painting in high contrast. I just thought that's so limiting and I don't want to limit myself like that. I like to use all the colors, all the saturations I do paint in a lifestyle sometimes, so have no fear. In the next lesson, I will show you how to, how to digitize your artwork if you have those lighter areas. But this is, this little thing right here is gonna be a lot easier because we are working with high contrast. So what I've done is I've just dropped my artwork into Photoshop and I wanted to show you real quick if you need to adjust your artwork, come over here to your adjustments tab. If you don't see this, go up to Window and hit adjustments and it'll show up. Otherwise, if you still don't see it, I would go to Workspace and reset your essentials. Alright, the adjustments tab. I'm just going to give you a really quick overview. I don't use a lot of these. You can explore them, but I'm going to show you the ones I use. Brightness and contrast is definitely want to use. You're just gonna take this little carrot here and toggle it. And as you can see, it can get really dark or it can get really, really light. Be careful with this one. Sometimes my scanner will, or if I take a photo, I'll make my artwork look a little bland. So just adding a little bit of brightness can be helpful. But if you go too far, your artworks going to look overexposed. And unless that's the style you're looking for, it doesn't look good. Contrasts same thing. It's either going to darken it or lighten it. And this looks pretty good to me right now. Another adjustment I use is hue and saturation. You can change the hue. This is making it a little more brown. This is going to make it more blue. I'm pretty happy with the color. So I'm just going to leave it there. Saturation. You can do heavier, less saturation. And then sometimes I like to add a little lightness if I want to soften it up a little bit. And lastly, you can use the selective color. Since this is just green. Not going to do too much, but you just play with these little toggles and you can make it lighter or darker. Some of these toggles are not going to respond. E.g. cayenne, it responds pretty much. But some e.g. if you had something that was read and you wanted to do green and toggle these, it's not really going to make that big of a difference. So these are just, you have to play with them to get the color or the way you want. And lastly is exposure I. It's similar to brightness but a little bit different. You can play with this as well. If you feel like you need that, then what you're gonna do is just merge these all down. And that way all of your adjustments have been added to your artwork. I'm just going to relabel this artwork. Okay, let's get started with removing and background. I'm we're not gonna do all of these because I don't want to waste your time. You just need to know how to do one of these. I'm going to use my Lasso Tool and I'm just holding down my mouse and trailing around this and then connecting them. And same thing layer via cut. I'm going to delete that bottom artwork. Just label this. Monstera. Probably spell this wrong. As you can see, there's this checkered background. And this checkered background means that the background of our artwork has been removed and it hasn't been removed here obviously because we're gonna do that right now. But one thing that I find super, super-helpful is to set up another layer back here because sometimes it's hard to see little gray marks are little white marks on this checkered background. Add a layer, put that layer underneath your artwork layer, and then come over here and select a color that is very different from what you're working with. I would say like a dark or bright orange is really different from what we're working with. Then grab your paint bucket and just click and it will fill that in. Now make sure you go back to your artwork layer. Otherwise, you're going to start using the eraser tool and you're just going to erase that paint layer. So there's a few different ways. Actually, I'm just going to show you the one way that I use because for something that's high contrast, it makes sense to do it this way. You're going to grab your eraser, Magic Eraser, and come up here to your tolerance. Since this is such high contrast, we can put our tolerance up pretty high. I would say 65. It's probably not going to get rid of any of our artwork, but it's just going to make a really clean cut removal of the paper. And all I'm doing, I'm sorry, make sure you have these two clicked, contiguous and anti-alias. Just click on the watercolor paper and it removes. It. Isn't that amazing. Click here, click here. All of the paper that you want to get rid of. It is literally that easy when it comes to high contrast artwork. So now you have this little leaf that the background has been removed and you can put it on wedding invitations, you can put it on t-shirts, stickers. You could do so much with it. You can come in here if you really want to clean things up better just with your eraser tool and you can remove this little area. I am a stickler about having a really clean artwork. But you don't have to get super crazy because this is watercolor papers. So you are going to have bumps here. Unless you're the kind of artist who can paint just super smooth with watercolor. I actually do know one and it's crazy how smooth she paints, but this is, I use cold press watercolor paper and it's really bumpy. So there's gonna be some texture in your artwork that's just normal. Here. I want to show you guys this. It's very important that you zoom into your artwork and make sure that you're not including because it looked really clean right when we're zoomed out. But as you can see right now, there is a little teeny dot right here. And this might not seem like much right now. Like, Oh, who cares, It's just a little dot. But if you print a wedding invitation with it, your client will see that tiny dots. So make sure you erase it and make sure there's no other dots like that because they will show up when printed on white paper. And I had this happen with one of my art prints and I had to reprint it, a reprint like 100 of them. So pay attention to that. Make sure you go round and you zoom in and zoom out. Because you want to make sure, oops, I switched my layers. You want to make sure that you got everything, okay, so that's how you digitize something that's super high contrast. Again, I would just export this as a PNG because you want to make sure that you're not adding in the background again. So just hit PNG and it's going to be transparent. Oops, I'm sorry. Make sure you unclick that painted layer. Otherwise it's going to bring it with you. Export as a PNG. Make sure it's a PNG and you can export it. And then when you put it on your stationary or whatever you're using it for, It's going to not have a background. One thing I do want to mention is you can, I would crop this in because you don't need all that extra space in your file. So I would just crop it into the size of your art work. There you go. That's how you digitize high contrast. Next, we are going to be digitizing something a little more difficult, which is artwork that is really light. 4. Digitizing Light Artwork: Phase one of the more challenging items to digitize. And that is something that is light. The contrast isn't going to be super high between the paper and the actual painting. These are some flowers that I painted. I also gave these to you guys if you want to digitize them along with me or else choose some of your artwork that is more light in nature, that seems more difficult to digitize. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab my Lasso tool again because I just want to take out this piece because we're going to focus on this piece right now. And again, I'm right-clicking layer via cut. I'm just going to remove that. I'm going to bring this one up into the middle and I'm going to zoom in. So if we went with our typical method of grabbing our magic eraser, a tolerance at 55 and I click, I'm losing a lot of my artwork here. And that's because the contrast just really isn't that high between the paper and the painting. So what Photoshop is doing is it's trying to remove the white, but since it's so close, It's taking out some of my artwork to now what you can do is you can play with your tolerance. So you can go down to 35 and see if that helps. It helps a little bit, but I'm still losing this piece over here. I can go down to 15 and see if that helps. That looks like it did help a lot. I'm going to add in that background layer. So I added a layer and then I am going to come over here and grab my paint bucket. And I'm on purple. It's going to paint this purple. I'm going to go back to my artwork. Now. I'm pretty happy with it, but actually it took out part of my artwork right here and we don't want that, huh? Oh, that was part of the artwork. Okay. Never mind. Let's go back. Let me undo that. And then I'm just going to go back and make sure you have that layer underneath because it's really going to help you out there that it did it pretty well. So you can, that's one way you can do it is you can lower the tolerance low enough that it does take out. So it doesn't take out your artwork. But the only thing that I don't like about that is it leaves it really jagged. Like all this stuff still needs to be removed. Oops, I need to be on my artwork layer. All this needs to be removed. You can come in here and you can see it's really not getting it very clean cut here. For some people, this is okay for me. Not, I don't really love that. So I want to show you two other methods that you can use. I'm just going to go back to our original and I'm going to add that second layer underneath, just so it's really easy for me to see if there's any of the white left. One method you could do is you can come over here to your lasso tool and you can grab them Magnetic Lasso. And how you're going to use this is you're just going to click. And I'm not clicking anything right now, I'm just dragging it and it magnetizes to the pixels that are the same color. This is one method you can use, is yes, a little time-consuming, but you can use this method. I recommend going pretty slow. If you start going really fast, It's going to get out of control and not hug the line like you want it to go backwards. Just hit delete, delete, and it's going to delete those anchor points. Then what you're gonna do is click and you want to close the circle. So you're going to click again. You're going to see the marching ants and you're just going to hit Delete, and it will delete that for you. That's one method you can use. Another method you could use is you can come in here with just a regular eraser. And you can either hold down the left-hand bracket and make it really small or hold down the right-hand bracket and make it bigger. You can just manually come in here and I'm holding down my mouse this whole time and erasing all of this, which honestly is a pain in the butt. That is how digitizing is. It can be a lot of work. What I would do here, those are different methods you can use personally. What I would do is I would come back up to my magic eraser and I would use that 15 tolerance again. Then I would increase the tolerance for some of these other parts because I know that they can handle it a little bit more because the contrast is higher up than not that piece. So you can do that. Another thing you can do is I'll show you guys right now. If I erased this, okay, I have to go backwards. Sorry. Okay. Let's say I move this up to 25. And that so 25 worked. See you guys. It's all Literally trial and error, like 1,000 times. It took some of this away. One thing that you can do if it took this away, but it's only this little part. In this little part, what you can do is come up to your stamp tool here, the clone stamp tool. And you're going to hit Option and then click in the same color that you want this to be. And then you can slowly, I'm holding down my mouse. You can slowly, basically redo this. I prefer. I mean, I'll use this sometimes. It is pretty nice if you need it. If it's something that I really particular about, I just do the pain, staking Eraser tool and erase everything so I can see over here to remove some of this. And since it's watercolor, watercolor, you can see it's darker here, it's lighter here. If I use a stamp tool, it's not gonna get that variation that I want. So the best way to do this, in my personal opinion, is to come in here by hand and erase away the stuff that you don't want. 5. You Did It!: Congratulations, You made it to the end of this class. I would love to know what you guys thought about this if you feel more at ease now that you know how to digitize your artwork, please, please, please leave me a review. If you have any questions at all, feel free to reach out to me or you can post in the discussion section. I love to hear from you guys. Also if you're on social media and you digitize your artwork and you want to show the world on Instagram, tag me at lavender and C. And I hope you have a wonderful day.