Learn how to digitize your handmade drawings/paintings !

Learn how to digitize your handmade drawings/paintings!

Hello everyone ! I hope you are having a great week, I'm back to share a little more of my work with you. This time I bring a series of tips on how to digitize our handmade works in such a way that they do not lose quality or impact when viewed in digital media.

-Use the sense of logic.

By this I mean that we must be attentive about what we want to achieve. For example, let's say we have made a pencil drawing on paper or cardboard, or perhaps some other support of other material, then we want to move it to the digital medium to publish it on our social networks. Logically we must use some method to make a photographic record to our drawing and thus translate our physical work to a digital file, let's not overlook the fact that with this procedure we are involving photography in our work routine, therefore there are certain basic configuration parameters that we must take into account. perhaps it sounds trivial to say this, but neglecting the technical processes of recording a work can distort what we want to say with our art and therefore a part of our work will have been in vain.

-Adjust what is necessary in the photographic edition.

Well, following the example of the previous point, let's say that I am going to take a picture of my drawing or painting, at this point we must decide what framing I am going to do to my work, if I only want the total of the format in which I did the work or if I want it to be on some support. We must also monitor the exposure value of the image, that is, the amount of light that I want to affect my image, if there is a lot of light in the place where you are photographing the work then it will be convenient to lower the exposure and if it is an environment with dimmer light raise it will be appropriate. Another parameter to take into account is the contrast, here you adjust the difference of illumination in the black and white gamma or in the color gamma. And finally there is the saturation, here you adjust the purity of the colors, if you lower it they will become more gray and if you raise it more vivid.

Sometimes it happens that the image we have created by hand loses pictorial quality because information is lost by not taking into account the basic parameters of photo editing, of course there is more and a whole world in terms of retouching and photo editing.

-The medium.

By this I mean adapting our recording methodology to the tool we are going to use, that is, if we are going to use a scanner, a camera or a camera phone. The important thing is to maintain a sense of correspondence between our original work and the final result in the digital medium.

Studio of masters.
Self-portrait of Joaquin Sorolla

This is a drawing practice about a self-portrait of the Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla, it was a 1 hour drawing session. For the registration I used a printer scanner, I adjusted a little the exposure and that's it.

However, the amount of adjustment required will depend on each work and the conditions in which the recording is made.

Studio of Masters
Reinterpretation of "Guest House Inhabitant".
Toulouse Lautrec

n this other handmade portrait study I focused on just scanning the image and adjusting the saturation to low because it is a dark light drawing, sometimes it happens that the result of the scanning does not give an image somewhat tinged towards a blue tone, sometimes green, this is common when scanning drawings made with pencil and in some cases it happens with the pen, with the inks you see little scanning error that as I said is solved by lowering the saturation of the image so that our black lines return to their original color, finally I just raised the exposure a little and that's it.

These would be a summary guide on how to digitize a handmade drawing or painting, of course there are more methods and aspects to take into account, any of the artists who make life in this community and have any questions or problems about how to digitize your handmade work, I will gladly answer your questions to the extent that I can.

Well friends this has been all for this post, I hope to be back soon with you providing more information about creative production methods. Thanks for your attention.