How to Digitize Your Drawings
As artists, many of us like to draw on paper. There is just something beautiful about the physical touch and movement of your pencil or paintbrush. Personally, that feeling and control can’t be replaced by digital drawing. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE digital drawing and painting, it’s less of a mess, LOL. I’ve already had one of my cats step on my palette and track oil paint all over the house. Now for the good stuff, how do you transfer your sketches and drawings into your preferred digital program?
First! What is the importance of digitizing your drawings? There are so many reasons to transfer your drawings, such as wanting to recreate and update a drawing, selling prints, creating stickers, creating beautiful digital art, and much more.
Follow along and learn four easy ways to transfer your drawings into the digital world using your phone, iPad, camera, or scanner. If you’re like me and just want the number of steps, you can also get your basic steps below.
Basic Steps to Digitize your Drawings
For my non-readers, here is a quick guide:
- Capture your artwork through a phone, iPad, scanner or camera
- Edit or make adjustments to enhance line work and remove background noise
- Import the image into your preferred drawing program
- Reduce opacity, create a new layer, and start drawing
Preparing Your Drawing for Digitization
Let’s begin by preparing your drawings for digitization! Taking a good reference image will make your life a lot easier. Make sure you are in a room with good lighting, any color in the lighting will be difficult to work with such as blues or yellows. If your home has poor lighting, wait until daylight and go outside in a semi-shady area. Another thing to make sure of is to clear out the space in which you’re placing your drawing to avoid shadows or clutter.
Enhance your Sketches After Transferring
There are so many programs that you can use to enhance your line work and reduce colors. This process is for users who add their images so they can begin to trace and start your digital drawing.
Here are a few free programs you can use to edit your sketches. All phones have editing tools, you can use their presets or just play with the settings alone. When editing sketches on my phone, I only edit brightness, exposure, contrast, and saturation. Other free tools include canva and VSCO.
Transfer Drawings With a Phone
The easiest way to transport your drawing is to take a picture with your phone. Whether your images are high-quality or low-quality depends on your phone. All you really want to do is get your drawing into your digital platform. I primarily use Procreate on the iPad because it’s my preferred method, but feel free to use Photoshop, illustrator, or any other program you like.
After taking a picture, I save it to my Dropbox. I like to keep my preliminary drawings and progress shots to see the drawing evolve, and later, I can create a little progress video. In reality, you don’t have to be as meticulous as I am, you can just email the image to yourself. Another option is if you have an iPhone to an iPad or an iPhone to a Mac computer, simply turn on your Airdrop and send that little baby through.
Transfer Drawings With an iPad
Transfer Drawings With a Scanner
I started my drawing journey using a scanner to transfer my drawings because that is the most logical way, right? The idea is it will get the cleanest line work and make it easy to work on files. I quickly noticed it wasn’t as easy as I had expected, but that was because I wanted it to be perfect already! I was hoping for a clean white background with just line work, but there’s some work to do here.
If your scanner is new, you need to make sure you have the scanner driver installed and have the correct program to utilize it. Once you scan your document, it’s best practice to name your file and organize it in a folder. Don’t let your desktop drown with seas of files. Next, you can use Photoshop or whatever your preferred program, in this case, let’s use Photoshop. Once I’ve scanned my image, I import it into Photoshop and increase the highlights and contrast to remove any distractions from the background. Once you are happy with this setup, you can decrease the opacity and start a new layer for tracing or painting.
Transfer Drawings With a Camera
Alright, digital camera lovers, how do you transfer your drawing with a camera? At this point, you should already have an idea. Take an image on a clean background, you want to avoid textured or low lighting. Head back to preparing your drawing for digitization if you want more tips on preparing your sketches to transfer into your art tools. To move images from a camera into your phone, your camera will either have a USB cable directly linked to your computer or an SD card that you can insert into your computer. Save your image and import it into your preferred art program.
Turn a Sketch into Digital Art
In conclusion, digitizing your drawings allows more opportunities to recreate, update, and share your artwork. We’ve explored four easy methods to transfer your sketches into digital art using a phone, iPad, scanner, or camera. Each method has its own challenges, but once you find your favorite, you’re on your way. I hope this helped! Happy drawing! 🧡
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