How To Trace A Hand Drawing In Photoshop

Learn valuable methods for honing your cartoon and analogy skills in Illustrator.

Colorful graphic of a Southwestern scene with cactus and a coyote howling at the moon

Figuring out where to begin and what to draw can exist challenging. Showtime, get yourself a sketchbook, take it with you lot wherever you get, and sketch your immediate surroundings whenever you tin can. Emulating the work of other illustrators is also a great mode to practice and larn. In a higher place all, remember, the more you lot practice, the closer yous are to finding your manner—or something that sets y'all autonomously.

A person's hand with a pencil drawing various forms of cactus plants

Honing your drawing skills is an ongoing process that requires a lot of practice. From tracing a hand-fatigued sketch to drawing from scratch in Illustrator, let's look at some of the most mutual tools and workflows for illustrating.

Get-go by tracing

You can easily base a new drawing on an existing piece of artwork by tracing it. If y'all sketch on newspaper, employ Image Trace in Illustrator, which lets you convert raster images (.JPEG, .PNG, .PSD, etc.) to vector artwork (shapes and paths).

Close-up on the left of a hand-drawn cactus, and the Image Trace properties box in Illustrator on the right side

Optimize creative freedom and control with drawing tools

If you prefer to jump right into digital illustration, the Curvature, Pen, or Pencil tools are great tools for analogy. The Pen tool in Illustrator is powerful, offer the most precision for creating curves and straight lines. Other tools, similar the Pencil tool or Paintbrush tool, are ideal for expressive, gratis-form lines. You tin use layers in the Layers panel to lock and dim the image and draw over the summit of the prototype using any of the cartoon tools.

A drawing of a cactus is light in the background, while the Pen Tool is being used to make points along the edge of the drawing

Stylize your artwork past adding texture

By applying a castor to new and existing paths created with the Brushes panel, yous can add textures that add style and uniqueness to your artwork. After applying a brush, y'all tin change the stroke of the path and other properties in the Properties panel.

Brush options shown on the right, and a line created with the Pen Tool is now green over the cactus layer

Tip: The Blob Castor tool is a great tool in Illustrator for inking illustrations like comic book art.

Illustrator is the manufacture standard tool for freehand cartoon or tracing and recoloring your sketches to turn them into works of fine art. Whatever you create, yous can use your illustrations anywhere—printed pieces, presentations, websites, blogs, and social media.