How do I clean up drawn lineart on my computer?

One thought on “How do I clean up drawn lineart on my computer?”

1. kar says:

   December 4, 2009 at 6:22 am

   Drawing requires a level of skill and technique. A drawing can be inserted into various forms of art, such as animation. To create a base drawing for a character, a line art drawing is generally created and then manipulated in a computer program. A computer program such as Adobe Photoshop can be used to clean the sketchy lines of a drawing and emphasize the line art.

   1.
   Step 1

   Begin to sketch with a light blue colored pencil. Do not worry about the sketchy lines; these will disappear later in the process.
   2.
   Step 2

   Take the sketch and follow along the main lines of the drawing with a black felt-tip pen. These black lines will create the final line art drawing, if there are blue lines that are important to the drawing, these should be traced as well.
   3.
   Step 3

   Scan the drawing onto your computer at a high resolution in RGB color format. Save the file as a .jpeg or .tiff file, ready to open in Adobe Photoshop.
   4.
   Step 4

   Open the drawing file in Adobe Photoshop. Once open, change the layers panel to channels. This will show the channels of color in the drawing. Once open, delete the red and green channels in the file. The blue lines will disappear once this is completed.
   5.
   Step 5

   Convert the drawing to grayscale. To do this, click Image > Mode > Grayscale.
   6.
   Step 6

   The existing lines may appear gray and fuzzy. To fix this, the levels should be altered. Select Image > Adjustments > Levels. Alter the levels to enhance the quality of the line art. Depending on the original drawing and line quality, this will vary from person to person.
   7.
   Step 7

   If the lines are still too light, adjust the contrast, selecting Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. The artwork should just be dark lines at this point.
   8.
   Step 8

   Finalize the cleanup by using the eraser tool. Make sure the background color on your palette is white and matches the background of the drawing. Use the eraser tool to delete any unwanted lines and clean up any extra elements in the drawing. The eraser tool can be used as a brush or block; experiment with the levels of opacity to fit your needs.
   9.
   Step 9

   Save the drawing with a new file name.

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