From Boring Sketches to Catchy Illustrations in Photoshop

Illustrations gives strength to our conceptual drawings. Check how to give your sketches or plain cad drawings the beauty they need in this tutorial of sketches to catchy illustrations in photoshop in simple steps.

Ingredients : Sketch or Cad drawing, Tree cutout, grass cutout, shrub cutout, Car cutout and a human cutout.In case you will be using a Cad drawing and not a sketch then export as two files, one with everything except text and one with text only. Both at same scale.

In all the steps below, you will be resizing images of Car, Human, Tree, Shrub etc just make sure you are resizing them in proportion to each other. For example keeping human height and car height in proportion. Then only your illustration will look soothing to eyes and acceptable.

Step 1: Adding soil.
Open the sketch or cad drawing in Photoshop. Make a new layer,rename to soil. After selecting cad layer, With magic wand(W), Tolerance around 5, select areas where you want to emphasize soil. Once selected, select soil layer and Fill Color(Shift+Backspace), choose color in option and hit ok. Then, Deselect (Ctrl+D).

Step 2: Adding Tree.
Drag drop image. Right click on layer to Rasterize it. If you have a free tree cutouts you might have grey dots in background. Select Magic Wand(W) and set Tolerance around 50(if white background,set Tolerance only to 5), click 2-3 times in image and extra background will be selected and hit Delete. Erase(E) bottom of tree, moreover it will be covered in next steps. Resize and position.

For steps below, you must know MASKING, click here to learn about it.

Step 3: Adding Grass
Drag drop image, right click to Rasterize it and clean it as done in step above. Resize and position. Now with Lasso tool(L), select the area where you want grass to appear, when selection is done apply Mask. Now take Brush(B), select Spatter Brush or some brush with uneven edges. Set Brush color to Black, select Mask of grass layer and stroke on left & right of visible grass to give uneven texture to grass because this is the way grass appears random and uneven. Save (Ctrl+S)

Check next page for Step 4-9