Uploading sketches and maintaining a sketch appearance

[CheeseHead05]

Hi community,

So, I have a small issue. I have some drawings that I want to upload and clean up some erasure marks but that's it. I would like to keep my drawing looking like an actual sketch with having the pencil sketch lines. I know that there is an image trace that I have used in the past for a drawing ect but ultimately it changes a few things on a drawing that I have noticed and also does not keep a "sketch" appearance. Is there any advice on what to do?

Thx

[Bobby Henderson]

If you're wanting a photo-realistic sketch appearance I would probably just do some minor touch up work on the scans of the drawings within Adobe Photoshop and save the results as lossless compressed TIF images.

There are various ways to mimic a sketch-like look on vector lines within Adobe Illustrator, but none will deliver results that look exactly like the original pencil drawings. They'll be, at best, graphical representations of the drawings. Live Trace is one approach. Hand-tracing clean lines over the top of the drawing is another approach; the resulting lines can be styled with art brushes to simulate the sketch look.

[Monika Gause]

Vektor graphics and a sketch like appearance don't go together well.

So why not edit your drawings in Photoshop?

And it would also be useful to see how you would like this to look.

[Jacob Bugge · Accepted solution]

CheeseHead,

Some kinds of clean up are better/more conveniently done with vector tools, in some cases more so  in AI than in PS.

A close up screenshot/partial image of an area round/including an erasure mark (preferably using the Insert Photos button (moon over mountains) at the top of the Reply box) could lead to more specific suggestions.

Whatever you do, saving JPEGs as JPEGs anywhere in the process will uglify your drawings.