Tutorial: Turn Your Sketches Into Clean, Sharp Vector Art

When you scan a sketch into your computer, the lines are often light and have fuzzy edges. Resizing the scan blurs or pixelates the image. You can use Photoshop to darken the lines, but they’re still not going to be as clean and sharp as if you vectored the sketch.

Vectoring your scanned sketches is great for comics or other artwork, and is especially handy in the process of logo design.

Automatic vectoring (shown in the above example) can result in the loss of some detail, but the benefits usually outweigh the costs. Manually vectoring an image is a more tedious process, so this tutorial is going to focus only on automatic vectoring methods. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Draw something.

Step 2: This will come out significantly better if you ink your sketch and erase the pencil lines. There are ways to darken pencil sketches in Photoshop before vectoring, but I won’t be going into that here.

Step 3: Scan your inked drawing.

Step 4: Unless you have an extremely powerful computer, you should probably reduce the size of the scan so your computer doesn’t crash trying to vector it.

Here is a comic I drew with pencil, then inked with a felt-tipped pen:

This is the best Photoshop can do to enlarge the non-vectored scan:

I’m going to describe two ways of vectoring your scan. The classic way is with Adobe Illustrator. We’ll start there.

Adobe Illustrator

Step 5: Open Illustrator, start a new file, and drag or copy the scan from where you saved it into the Illustrator work area.

Step 6: At the top of your screen in Illustrator, you should see a button saying “Live Trace” with a small down-pointing arrow near it. Click the arrow and from the drop-down menu, select an option. I like to use “Comic Art” for pretty much everything.

The computer will take a moment to complete the vectoring process. Once it’s finished, you can experiment with the settings for “Threshold” and “Min Area” to adjust the thickness of the lines and the detail level.

You may find it useful to click the “Expand” button, which will allow you to delete the background from the vector. Then, when you import to Photoshop, you can put the lines in a separate layer and lock it – you’ll never color over your lines by accident, and you’ll be able to color behind them and see through the formerly white areas.

Step 7: Save the Illustrator file. Now you have a vectored version of your sketch, which you can import into Photoshop at any size and still have perfect, non-pixelated lines.

Importing to Photoshop

Step 8: Open Photoshop, select the vector image in Illustrator and copy it to your clipboard (Ctrl+c). In Photoshop, create a new file (Ctrl+n). It should default to the size of the item on your clipboard, but you can adjust the canvas to any size you want. When in doubt, make it big and crop it down later.

Step 9: Paste your clipboard contents into the new Photoshop canvas (Ctrl+v). You will be asked to select a “Paste As” option. Choose to paste as “Pixels”.

Step 10: Adjust the dimensions of the pasted vector image. Hold the Shift key to maintain the aspect ratio while resizing. Once you’re satisfied, you need to “commit” the changes by clicking the check mark in the upper right area of the window.

You should now have your sketch in the desired size with sharp, clean lines and ready to be colored, posted on the web, or whatever you feel like doing with it.

Note that for the above example, I used a fairly low “Threshold” setting in order to preserve as much detail as possible, which leaves the image clean, but still with the feeling of a sketch.

If you don’t have Illustrator or Photoshop, fear not – there is a web-based service that can at least clean up the lines for you.

Vector Magic

Steps 1 through 4: Repeat them from above.

Step 5: Go to Vector Magic in your web browser.

Step 6: You won’t be able to get the vector source file without using the paid service, so if you’re just using the free service, make sure you adjust the size of your scan to whatever size you want your final image to be. You’ll want to leave about an inch of white space below your scanned image, because Vector Magic leaves a watermark which you might want to crop off later.

Step 7: Click on “Upload Image To Trace” and follow the prompts. Here are the settings I used:

• Logo with blended edges
• High quality level
• Limited colors – I chose just black & white.

Step 8: It will ask you to sign up in order to download your result because it wants you to spend a “token” to get the vector source file which you could then open in Illustrator. Once you use up your tokens, you’ll be asked to pay for the service to download source files. You can get a free .png file without signing up for the service by simply going back to the Vector Magic homepage. You’ll see an area with your uploads. Mouse over the green dot on the upload of your choice. This will let you download the free .png at the same size as the image you originally uploaded.

If you have questions or run into problems trying to use this tutorial, please comment below. If you try vectoring a sketch, feel free to post a link and share your result.

If there’s something else you’d like to see a tutorial about, please let me know.