Removing Paper Lines
| I tend to like drawing on lined paper if I don't have a sketchbook handy because it seems somehow less intimidating than a blank piece of plain white paper, but having to erase all the lines manually with the eraser tool is annoyingly inefficient, so here's a more or less "instant" method of erasing them. This won't work if your drawing is done in the same colour as your lines and you'll end up with an image in greyscale in the end, so this is best left for pencil drawings rather than coloured images. |
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So here's my beautiful sketch that I scanned in colour that I just happened to concoct on lined paper, but maybe I want to colour it without those annoying lines in the way! This will only get rid of those blue lines though, so you'll have to erase any visible margin lines yourself. I only really have experience with Photoshop, so I don't know how well this tutorial will apply to other image editing programs. And, if you're wondering where that "LIPS" text came from, here's the full picture.
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In the 'Layers' palette, there should be a tab for 'Channels' (if either of those things aren't on the screen, just go to the 'Window' menu at the top of the screen and make sure 'Channels' has a checkmark beside it) for you to click on. When you're in the Channels palette, delete one of the channels that isn't the one called 'Blue' either by right-clicking and selecting Delete or by dragging it to the little bin in the bottom corner. Your sketch will change colour when you do this. The names of the remaining two channels will change to something like 'Magenta' and 'Yellow' or 'Cyan' and 'Yellow' and you can go ahead and discard the channel that isn't Yellow.
(If you're using a weird paper that has lines that aren't blue, try toggling the visibility of different channels to see which remaining one will show your sketch without the lines so you know which channels you should delete.) |
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Here's my image with only the yellow channel remaining. There's one step left to making this image usable and it's quite important! Go to Image>Mode>Grayscale and then Image>Mode>RGB Color. You can't save it as any useful format like JPEG or GIF or anything if you don't at least change the image mode to greyscale. In 'RGB Color' mode, your sketch is ready to be coloured!
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