da image

first ... our lovely tutorial porpuse outline XD. Please note how BIG i I draw, this is a picture on a A4 size paper.

quick sketch scanned in300 dpi true color.

To be honest snapshot from digital camaras are the shit ... they look nasty and sometimes they are not good enought to be used as outline.

covering the mistakes

I have always been a messy artist, i mean, look at that coffee ring 0.0;;; i didnt put it there for tutorial porpuse, then some other stuff, like her nose and some pencil line i forgot to erase or i just ruined the paper ... and the character is not centered on the paper, it looks odd.

All this things get painted over, not erased

so far my picture has all messyness sort-of fixed ^__^UUU. The image looks much much neat and clean.

select / delete background

once you have covered every mistake with the most similar color go to select > color range.

and choose the white from the paper always trying to get a clean outline

press delete on your keyboard and say bye bye to the background.

now, select PRESERVE TRANSPARENCY on your layer window

making the outline the way i like it = not black

then duplicate (layer window - edit - duplicate) the outline layer and set both in PRESERVE TRANSPARENCY!!! awesomely important!

why duplicate???? because i dont like black outlines =/ i have said it like 3 times in every tutorial ... but if you dont have a problem with that all you have to do is the last step from this tutorial

now set this new duplicated layer mode or calculation to COLOR. Leave the original outline layer alone, you dont have to do anything else on it

fill in the layer on top (btw, this one should be the color layer) with a dark brown color. See the difference? ok ok, i know, i went too colorfull, it should be a little darker ... but still, the idea is to make the outline not so harsh to the eye ... purple, brown and sometimes even pink can work.

merge down (layer window - edit - merge down) both layer:

- on top: color mode layer painted in some color and

- bottom: standard layer with the outline in pencil.

my advice DO NOT USE MERGE VISIBLE, this will make the transparency go white =/ the result is the same but if while you are coloring you want to make the same color thingy to the outline you wont be able ...

and Finally

so far you should have one single layer ... now you just have to set its mode to MULTIPLE so you dont get any white pixels around the outline. This is how the blurness from the pencil and the dark brown works well for us (or at least well for me)

thats it ... ^-^ i like my scanned outlines this way, although since i got the wacom i no longer use them ^-^