From Paper to Screen: Editing Your Artwork in Photoshop

I prefer to scan my work rather than photograph it for a few reasons:

1 = it’s easier. I don’t have to mess with camera settings or get the perspective exactly right. I don’t have to worry about lighting and can scan at any time of the day, regardless if it’s sunny or not.

2 = I generally paint on 11x15 inch paper, which is easy to scan. Even though my flatbed is 9x12, I can just scan in two pieces and fuse together in photoshop. 

Equipment:

I use an Epson V550 Photo Scanner. Last time I checked, It was around $190, which is a pretty great price considering the quality of the scans. While I travel, I use a Canon scanner that’s lightweight and easy to toss into my backpack. 

Process:

I  scan my paintings in a super high resolution– around 1600 DPI or so. The files are huge, but this allows me a lot of flexibility. (You can always scale down, but once you start scaling up, you lose quality, so it’s better to start with a higher res file than you actually need.)

It’s important to clean your scanner bed before every use. You’d be surprised how much grit winds up in there- dust, eraser scraps, and dried flakes of paint. Scanning in my work takes several minutes and I usually hold my hands over the lid to make sure my paper is pressed tightly against the glass. Stay incredibly still while it’s scanning, or else an area will blur. 

I try to line up my paper as best I can while I scan. This helps when I’m going to be fusing two scans together into one image= if both files are already lined up well, it’s less work on my end when I adjust them to blend together.

Also, if you’re going to be scanning in multiple pieces of the same artwork, make sure you’re always laying the paper out in the same angle. When the laser highlights the paper, a slight shadow is cast over the texture of your paper. If you have to do a multiple scan of the same artwork and you weren’t consistent with the angle in which you laid your paper out, the textures won’t match up & half your painting will look slightly different than the other half.

If you have the option, save your files as Tiffs. This will give you a truer scan and prevent quality loss that would would otherwise occur in a JPEG.

About:

This section is all about cleaning up your artwork once it’s been scanned in and is digitized.

• Fuse multiple scans together

• Remove the paper background and replace it with a fresh new layer

• Erase out any imperfections like pencil marks or paint splatters.

Alright, so now we’ve got two scanned files of the same artwork and we need to fuse them together in Photoshop and make one cohesive file that looks flawless. In addition to merging the scans into one file, we’ll be cleaning up our artwork by removing pencil marks, errors, and imperfections that came though in the scanning process. We’re also going to be removing the paper background from the illustration and adding in a new one on a separate layer. 

Merging Multiple Scans Together:

Let’s merge our two separate files into one flawless illustration. We’re going to start by pulling both into a master file, which I use for all of my paintings. I call it “Template” because that’s exactly what it is. It contains two layers: a watercolor paper texture layer and a signature layer.

My template file is saved at roughly 31 x 42 inches at 300 dpi and an RGB color mode. I chose these dimensions because they’re similar to my original painting dimensions and I chose this size because it’s large enough to be printed on any product, including wall tapestries, bedding, and all wall art sizes.

Always work in RBG color mode if you’re going to be uploading the work on print-on-demand sites to sell. If you use CMYK, the colors will get wonky when you upload. I’ve added the “multiply” transparency effect to my “signature” layer, which helps it blend in to the paper texture background & seem as if it were really drawn on that exact paper.

What we’re going to do is drop in our scanned files into this master file & blend the illustration together into one layer, giving us a total of three layers to start with. I’ll start by dragging my scans in and giving both a transparency effect of multiply so I can see what I’m doing and make sure they’re roughly lined up for when I rotate them to the dimensions of my master file. I’ll size them down a smudge to fit within the dimensions.

Next, I’m going to really make sure that both layers are overlaid as close to perfect as possible. You can hold down the control key if you want bypass Photoshop’s tendency to move images by jumping several pixels. The control key lets you move exactly pixel by pixel. 

Once it looks as close to perfect as possible, I’m going to use my lasso tool to isolate the upper half of my illustration. It gets pretty tight in some areas, so we can zoom in. It’s inevitable that there are also going to be some areas that I just need to cut across directly. I cut through now & worry about blending it later. Once the entire upper section is selected, I’m going to toss a mask on there and turn off my multiply transparency effect for both, since they’re no longer needed. Masks are great because they give room for errors. I still have access to the full illustration underneath the mask, so if I need to back later & bring something back in, I can do it easily & the data isn’t lost.

Now we’ve got a nearly perfect merge of both top & bottom half of our illustration. Let’s go fix our problem areas where I had to cut directly through.

Now let’s zoom out and make sure everything looks great before we flatten. When we merge the two layers together, we’re going to lose the illustration that’s hidden n the lower half of that mask. It doesn’t matter, we’ve blended perfectly, so I don’t care.

The final result is one flattened layer that contains our full illustration, merged together seamlessly. In the next session, we’ll remove that paper background.

About:

In this section, we’re going to walk though all things COLOR.

• I’ll show you how to optimize the color within your existing illustration so the tones are deep and saturated.

• We’ll explore color palette variations and tricks to adjusting the colors to create a variety of options. We’ll utilize hue/saturation, color balance, and gradient overlays with transparency effects.

• I’ll also show you how to spot-edit colors so that some areas within your illustration be can be adjusted separately from other areas.

About:

In this session, we’ll be exploring methods to create patterns out of your artwork. Patterns are great for particular applications in ways that your original illustration might lack. 

For me, patterns sell particularly well on:

• phone cases

• bedding

• leggings

• curtains 

When you create a pattern, you open up the possibilities for broadening your product selection , especially if your original painting doesn’t really mesh with certain products with dimensions that are vastly different from the dimensions of your painting.

Patterns provide an opportunity to take your illustration to the next level beyond your original artwork.

I’ll be focusing on two types of patterns:

1. Structured patterns

2. Loose patterns

Depending on your motif, you can choose whichever one feels right to you.

I’m going to use a variety of my artwork for this video, as each painting lends itself best to a particular pattern style.

About:

If you’re planning on uploading your artwork through print on demand sites or license it out at all, you’ll need to know how to resize and reformat your work for various template dimensions. I create most of my artwork work at 11x15 dimensions, but some templates like mugs or beach towels require extreme vertical or horizontal dimensions. Instead of just nixing those products from my shop all together, I adjust my artwork so that it can fit a wide variety of dimensions. There are some tricks to doing this successfully, and I’ll walk you through my list.

I have five main files that I save for each piece of artwork:

1. The original. I merge my layers together, which are paper background, artwork, and signature, & save as a flattened JPEG. This gets printed as wall art, which makes up a big chunk of my sales.

2. The original, minus my signature and paper background. The reason I remove these things is because I want to save this as transparent PNG so it can be printed on t-shirts and transparent phone cases. Leaving the signature on is up to you. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, it just depends on the application. Many people don’t like their t-shirt graphics to have a pencil signature on the bottom.

3. A pattern. I save this at very large dimensions, so it can be applied to any product, regardless of size. I make all my patterns square & can crop in accordingly based on the particular dimensions.

4. A pattern with a transparent background. This is the exact same file as the one before it, minus the background. This gives me flexibility in case I want to use the pattern as a transparent phone case instead of the main artwork image.

5. In some cases, I’ll create a fifth file that contains the original artwork mirrored once. This can come in handy if want something with more of a horizontal pull, but don’t want to use a full pattern.