I can’t draw

One of the many reasons why I take photographs is because I can’t draw. Well, I can draw technical drawings, within limits, but it takes a while, and the human form isn’t amenable to being drawn that way. So I take photographs. But I like sketches, and I’d like to be able to sketch. Now I’ve found an interesting option.

PhotoShop has an array of filters that do strange things. I doubt I’ll even scratch the surface of the filters built into CS3, let alone indulge in the multitude of filters that are available for download, either for money or for free. That doesn’t mean I don’t play around sometimes. I had fun playing with the Emboss filter a while back. Doubt I’ll ever use it for real, but it does make some cute images. Maybe if I wanted to turn an image into a button for a windows interface of some kind.

 The one filter I use on every image is Sharpen – I generally use Smart Sharpen, because I prefer the results I get with it. Old-style PS users tend to stick to Unsharp Mask (never have understood why it’s called “un-sharp”, but that’s not important).

Anyway, I occasionally explore the Filters menu when I’m playing with PhotoShop. A few days ago I tried using the Find Edges filter on an image I’d converted to a semi-silhouette (I talked about semi-silhouettes a while back). The results surprised me. I got an image that looked to me exactly like it had been sketched using coloured pencils. Not necessarily the right coloured pencils, but coloured nonetheless. That is rather neat! If I converted the result to monochrome I could end up with a regular pencil sketch, but I like the coloured version. This is very exciting for someone who can’t sketch, but wants to. In the example semi-silhouette here I think it’s really interesting how the sketch shows the face as blank (because it was black in the original) – it looks as though the sketch is unfinished, as though the artist left off before sketching the face. That adds to the feeling of the image being a sketch, for me.

Having made this serendipitous discovery, I started trying it on other images. It rapidly became clear that my fondness for clean white (or black) backgrounds was a huge plus when using this technique, because it yielded a clean background – another thing that enhanced the feeling on this image being a sketch. Using the silhouette technique first isn’t a requirement (although it does produce strong edges, which doesn’t hurt). The next example isn’t a silhouette – it’s the same model, coated in olive oil (it’s good for the skin, apparently, as well as making her smell like Greek food – amusingly, we had treated ourselves to Greek tavern food before this shoot).

The background doesn’t have to be white – it can be black (I discussed the special features of white and black backgrounds another time). It is easy to make completely pure black and pure white backgrounds. That really helps when you want to produce these sketch-like images, because it means there are no edges in the background. If we use strong edge lighting we can get thick edges. This image was lit using two large slot softboxes, positioned left and right of the camera, at 90 degrees to the camera angle. This results in an image that looks like it was outlined with a blunt 6B pencil. I toned the edge down a little by using a large round brush painting pure white (another good reason to get a clean white background).

This is one of those effects you can over-use (although not as quickly as Emboss). I won’t process every image I take this way – that would be ridiculous. But it produces attractive results that mimic sketches. Suddenly I can make a kind of art I have never been able to make before, and that means a lot to me – hence this write-up.

 I think I’ll go play with some more of the filters in the PhotoShop menu…