Core77

Yo! C77 Sketch: Digitally Rendering a Shoe

Michael DiTullo shows us how to add color to a pen sketch in Photoshop

By Michael DiTullo - February 22, 2018

in Yo! C77 Sketch | Sketching

To bring the fidelity of a sketch up just a little bit, I'll render it digitally. In this video I'll take a simple ballpoint pen drawing of a shoe and show you how I simulate color, form, and texture in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet.

As always, if you have any questions or comments on the techniques shown, leave them in the comments below. What other techniques would you like to see?

Enter a caption (optional)

Yo! C77 Sketch is a video series from Core77 forum moderator and prolific designer, Michael DiTullo. In these tutorials, DiTullo walks you through step by step rapid visualization and ideation techniques to improve your everyday skills. Tired of that guy in the studio who always gets his ideas picked because of his hot sketches? Learn how to beat him at his own game, because the only thing worse than a bad idea sketched well is a great idea sketched poorly.

o
1

Favorite This
Q
2

Comment

Comments

Mike Heck

6 years ago

Z

1Z

Reply

Great video, thanks for taking the time to make it and for sharing. Those textures really make that sketch pop!
One thing that might help your workflow... if you hold down "Shift" as well as "ctrl V" (I'm on a PC) when you paste, your items will paste into the image as expected, but also be in the same place they were onscreen so you don't need to move them back into place.

!Report as spam
Luke Fabis

6 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

The liquify filter can give the textures a little more dimensionality. The idea would be to distort them along the contour of the surface. Bloat where they approach your eye, pucker were they recede, and push or even twirl where the angle shifts away from the plane of view. Photoshop unfortunately lacks After Effects' mesh warp tool or Illustrator's envelope distort tool, so it's harder to be precise and repeatable. But that's not much of a problem for something meant to have a sketchy look.

That does preclude using the texturize filter, though. You'd instead have to play with blend modes, and either crop or mask the textures you're working with.

!Report as spam