Shoeshine Scenario: Pencil Technique

These drawings were created to illustrate a scenario-sketching technique described on the Design for Service weblog. View the full set of pencil scenarios images.

Step 1: This is the original photo. Image selection is important. The best images tend to be bold with simple backgrounds and few extraneous details. Stock photos work best, but you can also search for Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr or shoot custom photos for particular scenes.

Each image in your scenario should be resized to the same dimensions and resolution. These directions are based on a 150dpi image file.

Step 2: Start by simplifying the image with the Median noise filter in Photoshop. We're looking for only the most important shapes for the sketch and this filter gets rid of unimportant details by averaging each pixel against its neighbors. A setting of 3 pixels is usually enough but complex images might need more.

Step 3: Now convert the photo into a basic line drawing with the Find Edges stylize filter. This filter automatically traces the boundary between light and dark values and between adjacent colors. There aren't any settings for this filter.

Step 4: Convert the image to black and white using the Desaturate image adjustment or by setting the image to grayscale. It's important to do this after the Find Edges filter and not before, otherwise important color boundaries might be lost.

Step 5: The lines are a little too perfect, so the next step is to distort them so the final sketch looks hand-drawn. Use the Sprayed Strokes brush strokes filter with a stroke length of 20, a radius of 0 and a stroke direction of right diagonal.

Step 6: Run the sketch through the Colored Pencil artistic filter to complete the hand-drawn effect. Use a small pencil width and stroke pressure: both set to 3 for this example, and a paper brightness set all the way to 50. It's important to use the same settings for each image in your scenario, otherwise the final effect won't match.

Step 7: You could stop right here if you wanted and still have a perfectly acceptable sketch but it's nice to go back and add some shadows. Save the line sketch you just made and then start with a new version of the original photo. We'll come back to the line sketch at the end.

Step 8: To create the shadows, use the Stamp sketch filter in Photoshop. It simplifies the image into areas of light and dark. There are two sliders that vary the balance of black and white and the smoothness of the resulting stamp shape. The right settings vary depending on the nature of the photo. You don't need much shadow.

The stamp filter uses the colors you have set for foreground and background on the tool palette.

Step 9: Just like the original line drawing, use the Sprayed Strokes brush stroke filter to roughen the edges of the shapes and create the beginnings of a hand-drawn effect. The stroke length and radius are both set to 0 and the stroke direction, like the line drawing, is right diagonal.

Step 10: Use the Film Grain artistic filter to add some specks of light within the dark color, otherwise the shadows will be too uniform. Set the grain to 7, the highlight to 3 and the intensity all the way to 10. This setting should be the same for each image in your scenario.

Step 11: To make the shadows match the line drawing, use the Colored Pencil artistic filter with the same settings as before: Pencil width and stroke pressure of 3 and a paper brightness of 50. This is the final shadow image, ready to add back to the line drawing.

Step 12: Finally, combine the line drawing with the shadows by setting the layer blending mode for the line layer to Darken and stacking it above the shadow layer in the Layers palette. This makes the light areas transparent, allowing the shadows on the layer below to show through.

For a more complex drawing effect, try the Prismacolor marker sketch technique.