Sketchbook, page 5

(Previous pages)

The process of filling a 120 page sketchbook by year's end continues:


"p.4 of How to Draw Animals by Jack Hamm"
In this case, I actually like the drawing better with its blue guidelines showing. The quirk of a non-photo blue pencil, a special light blue pencil that will not show up if photocopied, is that it shows up in scans. There's probably a way to account for this if you've got the right scanner or scanning software, but I don't know it offhand. For me, that means Photoshop.

I flipped through my manual a few times without discovering a simple solution, so I turned to the web. Google came up with an awesome site targeted at comic book creators, full of cool tips.

To remove non-photo blue pencil lines from your image:

Go to Image>Adjust>Hue/Saturation or press Ctrl+U to bring up a dialog box. Set the color from Master to Cyan, then run the Saturation down to -100 and the Brightness to 100. You should see most, if not all of the blue lines disappear. Do the same thing for Blue, and if there are any color lines remaining then go through the other colors and do it again. -Inkthinker, message #2

Since I'm not looking to make my pencil lines black, I just removed the cyan and the blue which works quite well for me. Seems like this technique should work for removing a regular light blue pencil's lines as well if you want to give it a try and don't have a non-photo blue one handy. (I bought mine at A.C. Moore but have also seen them at Michael's. At both places, they were in the display of colored pencils you can buy individually. Where they print the color on the side of the pencil it reads: Non-Photo Blue.) Let me know if you try it!


A year ago on TTaT: Now she's a superhero