It’s maybe a tattoo, or a simple drawing in a piece of paper. Or your family emblem or just a billboard for your business. there’s always useful to know how to digitize a drawing, maybe for a business purpose or just to save a copy of a valuable image for you.
At Logotypers we digitized more than 7000 drawings, sketches, pictures, tattoos, even puppy pictures (a lot of them 🙂 )
To be honest, you need some kind of knowledge and skills to digitize drawings properly. It always depends on the complexity of the image you want to digitize.
How to digitize a drawing: The techniques (from easy to not that easy)
Technique 1 (easy): Scan/import/auto-trace the drawing
This is the simplest way to do it. it consist into get the picture you want to digitize into your computer, and import or load it into a vector editor app (we strongly recommend you to grab an evaluation copy of Adobe Illustrator here)
Import the desired image into Adobe Illustrator (File > Place image) Select the image and open the Image Trace utility (Window > Image Trace)
- Hit on the “trace” button: You can adjust contrast on the Threshold slider.
- Select the traced image and expand it. (Object > Expand)
- Now your raster image is turned into vectors. An extra step can be to clean up the digitized drawing a bit. This can be archived selecting unnecessary parts with the white cursor (2nd one on the toolbar)
Now you are ready to save your digitized image. Since it’s a vector image you may use it for any printing. Also you can scale it to any size without loosing resolution.
The main drawback of this technique is digitized image will contain imperfections and not desired elements due it’s an automated process (machines are not ready to recognize what does looks good and what doesn’t. At least in 2018 🙂 )
2. Manually trace every single detail of the drawing (harder):
This is a bit harder, but results will be more professional. It consist into tracing over the image every single detail to archive the same idea but into a digitized and usable image.
- As in the first technique about how to digitize a drawing, you need to place the image you want to digitize
- Lock it (this will prevent undesired clicks on the image)
- Select the Pen tool (or just press P on your keyboard)
- Click on some point of the drawing and start adding nodes. They will be connected automatically.
- You need to decide on the fly if you need a straight line or a curve. For curves, just click and drag your pointer. This will show you curve controls you can edit later, but I recommend you to not to stop on details now.
- When main shape is done, start with details. (hear, eyes, nose in this case)
- Once everything is traced, select all of the traces and change color (Window > Color) of the stroke to the desired one.
- Some parts should be also filled. Click on those parts and from the same palette (Window > Color) pick a color for filling.
- Once main art is done, you can tweak nodes by selecting them with the same white pointer as in the prior technique (or just press A)
You can see the whole process in the video below:
3. Re-think / improve the drawing, then digitize (God level)
And this is what we do at Logotypers. It consist into applying design concepts and graphic design strategies to a simple drawing / picture / sketch. (including shapes simplification, color scheme generation, layout improvements, etc) and then finally generate a digitized version for it.
Learning how to digitize a drawing may take a few minutes or 5 years (depending on your previous background) and also depending on the complexity of the drawing.
This time-lapse animation below will show you one of the jobs we did at Logotypers. You may see basic technique is tracing every single detail. Then a lot of mixed techniques were applied. Coloring. Shapes mixing. Lighting. Grid control. Texture. Stroke fluid effect, etc. (also you may notice we traced the tattoo machine from a real picture, not out from the original drawing because we saw dimensions were wrong on customer’s sketch)
If you have a drawing and want us to turn it into a professional digitized and vectorized image, or just to see if your drawing can be digitized properly, please to upload it by clicking the button below.
Upload your drawing for a free revision