Can't draw? No problemo

Heh heh. You have no idea how happy I am to have found this post below. I can't draw to save my life. Seriously, I've tried, like, so many many times but what i endup producing is no better than my 4-year old niece's artwork. Great work from her, major FAIL for me. My inability to draw anything but sickly looking stick figures has never really been a problem but now with my desire to create truly unique invitations, it's evident that I have to produce unique illustrations for these invites. Well, have no fear, Miss locket is here!

This post details steps to re-create any picture as an illustrated drawing.



I can't wait to find a picture I love and re-create it!

From Miss Locket's post:

Step 1: Find a photo of the image you would like to draw. Scale it down so it prints to a size you want to use.

Step2: Print said image (it doesn’t have to be color).

Step 3: Get your Sharpie ready (or other fine tipped pen that will bleed through the paper)

Step 4: Trace the major lines of the image. It’s a good idea to include the fine lines too so you know where to add shading (a.k.a. lots o’ dots).

Step 5: Flip your paper over. You should see faint lines where your tracing has bleed through.

Step 6: Re-trace over the lines with your Sharpie. Using your best judgement shade different parts with a series of dots and darkened areas. This part does take a little more intuition, if you are worried about messing up draw the shading with pencil first then go over again with the Sharpie (I haven’t tried this, but I am sure it would be fine).

Ahhhh….progress

Step 7: Admire your work :)

Step 8: You now have a “hand-drawn” illustration of your choosing. You can scan this into your computer and with some fine editing it can be saved as a vector for use in your projects. Keep in mind this is the mirror image of the initial photo so you may want to flip it in a photo-editing program. You could also make a copy of the image first so when you scan you will have more of a “true-white” as a background.

Step 9: Play with your drawing on your computer.

Here is an example of what you can do with your “drawing” using a little help from Photoshop:

It only took me about 10 minutes to “draw” this flower from start to finish.

The time-consuming part came in with the computer editing. It’s my guess that the less detailed the drawing you have the easier it will be to extract and save it as a vector. It is also probably dependent on how you plan to to use your drawing.
In the peony example I wanted to only have lines with the background empty, this meant I needed to go in and remove the “white space”. This was somewhat time consuming, but well worth it. I now have a peony vector to use in any project. (PS…I am no graphic designer so I may be using the wrong term, I always forget what the difference is between raster/vector)