Sketching is a big part of the design process as architectural students. Whether it is for brainstorming design concepts or for documenting the development process of your designs your sketchbook is one of many tools that we use to safeguard all the drafts of figuring out what it is you want your designs to look like. Sometimes we often forget just how much we do in our sketchbooks or as sketches whilst we are working. When all things have been digitised it is easier to ditch the sketchbook and draw straight onto Photoshop or Illustrator so that it is ready to insert for post-production of renders and finalised versions of your design explorations. As someone who wasn’t the most confident using the computer or drawing by hand I’d turn to my sketchbook because I had to find a place to unload all the messiness that is involved in trying to understand what you want to communicate to your tutors in your submissions.
Sketchbook work isn’t always refined, well at least that’s one way to ease the pressure of having one that is. but you should still include it in your portfolio. In this week’s discussion, I share how to digitise both black and white as well as colour sketches that ease into your portfolio visuals seamlessly using a few simple steps.
For Coloured / Marker Sketches
Since this was a sketch concept drawn on tracing paper the first step was to ensure that I could fade the paper as much as possible without making the drawing faded.
In the second image centred, you can see that dragging the brightness removed too much of the coloured felt marker so decreasing to the middle would still maintain the rich colour of the markers. The paper you’ve scanned has an influence on the way it will appear, in this instance the black marker I used was appearing as blue. Although I didn’t mind this, this is something to think about and sticking to regular 80gsm paper would have made a difference.
The commands used for this particular example were as follows:
Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast
For Pencil/Pen Sketches
Usually, with scanned sketches using pens or pencils that aren’t coloured, it can be easier to get the seamless transition from paper to portfolio page. If you haven’t scanned your sketches as black and white then these Photoshop tools will come in handy.
I don’t know too much about this command but when you toggle with the marker and reading the graph like graphic indicates how solid the marks of your drawing will be. Now assuming you want your drawing to come out as bold as possible you want to move the marker to a point where the drawing is just about to completely be overtaken by a black fog.
As shown below when moving the marker towards a threshold number that was higher the drawing seemed to look like ink had spilt all over the drawing. What you want to make sure is that you find a point where the lines of your sketch are both bold and filled enough to see clearly. The threshold tool isn’t a guarantee that it will fix how bold your lines were, that is for you to have done before scanning it in, the clearer your lines are from the beginning the cleaner the transfer will be.
The commands used for this particular example were as follows:
Image -> Adjustments -> Threshold
If you prefer in a video format I managed to record a quick tutorial going through how I’ve used these steps in my own design work below:
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CMzsD_zAQrw/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Let me know if you’ve found this helpful, or if you have any questions!