Pencil drawing or digital art? Additing digital colors to pencil drawings.

HI everybody! Here I would like to show you how I create a mixed media drawing.

At first I draw characters on a regular 80g paper with Caran D'ache graphite pencils (3B). Then I scan my drawing and I do some contrast in Photoshop.

This is how the scanned illustration looks like after adjustments:

Now I name this layer "BW_Original" and I set "Multiply" in "Blending options" . This option makes the white color transparent.

Then I select with a “lasso tool" each shape where the color is different and I create separate layers with new names: Hair, Face, Eyes....

I change the colors with a Hue/Saturation tool: Image / Adjustmets/ Hue/Saturation.

Please note that the "Colorize" option must be swiched ON

This is how the layer "Hair" looks like after changing the color.

And here is how the entire image looks like after changing the color on all the shapes.

Now I import my scanned textures. I trace the necessary outline with the “lasso tool” and I create copy of this shape with texture as a separate layer.

Here is how the image looks like with adjusted texture on the face.

And here is the image with all the colored shapes.

Now I print the illustration on a regular 80g paper for printers and I draw a colorful background:

I find that it is very difficult to get a good result of a scanned pencil drawing. My scanner, for example, gives some blue-green hue to my images what is hard to improve in Photoshop.

That is why I invented this technique to color the black and white drawings in Photoshop. It gives me the possibility to keep my loose style and to get the right color.

To get the final result I combined a cleaned flower background with the colored characters.

I tried to drow in different mediums: Procreate and a Graphic Tablet, but I am still a big fun of graphite pencils.

Probably, my drawing technique is not the easiest way to draw, but I hope that for somebody this post would be useful.