Guest tutorials » Photoshop » Line art (tracing)

This would be the cheating way of doing line art, that does not involve any drawing experience at all (thank God), so if you can't draw, even if your life depended it, you can do this. Line art to me is basically taking a picture and tracing it. Yes tracing. So first off, use a picture that’s easy to distinguish, no big horse herd, when you want one horse to draw. If you want a lot, go for it. Because chances are if you try to draw a horse in a big crow it's going to come out with an extra hoof, leg, head, something, trust me. I've done it. Not cool. Also, do not choose a horse for color. I know it's cliché, but you can always change the color. So be smart kiddies. Use a horse that has a clear outline. No pixely crap, and absolutely no choosing a crappy horse picture for the color. You can and probably will change the color. Not many beginners can bull off a blue roan, so get that out of your head now. We will be using four tools.

One is the brush tool. The settings will be like this:

Two is the eraser, we all loveee this tool, don't deny it! Tree is the pen tool, this is the tool we'll use the most. Learn to hate this tool, I already do. -.-

This is the pony I'll be using:

Start by zooming in:

This isn't what it looks like O.O Take your pen tool and make an anchor point by clicking

And another by clicking a little bit farther away:

You have to bend the line by clicking in the middle with the pen so you get a new point:

See the little dot? Hold crtl now. Click the dot while holding down crtl and bend the line:

See the little box that appears? Click stroke path:

Don't forget to use a new layer. I did at first, but "undo" is a good friend of mine too.

Continue around the horse:

You'll now have three layers:

If you're making a white horse, use blue or red as basic color.

Add a new layer (1), and take a darker color than your base (2):

You can be messy! We'll fix it in time. Next, on your dark shading layer, go to "Filter blur" – "Gaussian blur" and it'll blend:

Add a new layer, this time, choose a lighter color:

Use Gaussian blur again. And continue painting as you please:

I ended up changing the whole color. Merge visible layers, or all your shading layers – Not the line art!

Take the magic wand (set tolerance to 100%):

And click (from the line art layer)

Clicked on the merged shading layer, and layer via cut:

And TATTAAAA

This tutorial was made by Ceilo from the tutorial forum :) Distributed with her approval.