Pencil Line Art to Finished Illustration in 10 Minutes

Overview: This tutorial will give step by step instructions for creating a finished illustration from a pencil drawing in around 10 minutes.

The drawing below is our starting point. This is not ideal for creating a colorized illustration because of the finely shaded lines and smudges, but it makes a good example for dealing with this kind of source material. Ideally this drawing would have been done in ink or electronically. 

Here is the final result of the steps given in this tutorial. Of course numerous different choices could have been made. This is just one way to do this quickly in TwistedBrush.

Step 1: Our first goal is to get a pure black and white line drawing with enclosed shapes for easier filling and coloring and masking.

For the first step, the Line Art Cleaner filter is used. Select the Filters > Color > Line Art Cleaner menu.

Step 2: Below are the settings for the Line Art Cleaner and also the result. The preview check box is enabled, allowing us to see the results before applying them. When done, the Apply and Continue button is pressed because another filter will be applied.

Step 3: Now the Value Blur filter will be used to further accent the lines. Here are the setting and results. Again, the Apply and Continue button is used because there is another filter to be applied.

Step 4: Now one more pass through the Line Art Cleaner to clean up the lines after the Value Blur filter. When done the Apply/Exit button is pressed.

Step 5: The automated steps of creating the line drawing are done. Now a little manual touch is need to close up some shapes and erase any remaining areas that aren't wanted. The Plain Coverage Paint brush with the color black at size 2 is used to finish up any lines. The girls robe, face, and hair are worked with this brush. The Hard Edge Eraser brush is used to clean up any extra lines or marks, such as those in the lower left corner. Now the drawing is ready to be painted.

Step 6: Because the girl's hair is not a fully enclosed shape, we will paint that first on a separate layer using the Multiply layer mix mode. This will allow the black lines to remain while we paint over them with yellow hair color. 

After creating the layer, the Plain Coverage Paint brush is used with yellow to paint the hair. Don't worry about painting over the black lines. They will remain because of the Multiple mix mode. 

Step 7: Once the hair color is painted, Merge the layer. 

Step 8: Next a gradient will be used to paint the background. To do this we have to make sure only the background is painted. Masks are used to protect other areas. First, the Magic Mask Wand is used to select the various background areas. (Remember when using tools from the tool bar, a right mouse click is used on the canvas.) If the mask checkered pattern isn't showing up, make sure the mask is set to Enabled and Visible in the Mask Menu.

Step 9: Mask > Invert is used to invert the mask so that only the background is not masked. This means only the background can be painted. The Gradient tool is used with 2 shades of blue to paint the gradient in the background. Again it's a right mouse click and drag to control the direction of the gradient, as indicated by the arrows.

Now that the background is painted, use Mask > Clear Mask to turn off the mask. 

Step 10: The Paint Bucket tool is now used to fill in the various shapes. Select a color and right click within a shape to paint it. Red for the girl's robe, for example.

Masks could have been used on the different shapes, just like was done for the background, allowing the shapes to be painted with more detail, or filters could have been used, allowing unmasked areas to be filled with patterns, etc. But this is a quick transformation so solid colors are used here. 

Step 11: We're almost done. The edges are a little jagged. While it helps to have solid non-smoothed edges when selecting areas and filling them, the final look may not be ideal if the image isn't going to be reduced in size. So for this example the Anti-Alias filter is used to smooth out the lines giving a more finished look.

 That's it, a complete transformation of a fairly difficult source picture!