Making a Crayon Drawing

 

Find some line art, clip art, stained glass pattern you want to use, or create your own drawing. I used this one from The Glass Artisan, Pickering, Ontario. Click here for the image. Hit shift-D to duplicate and close the original.
Right click on background layer in layer panel and promote to raster layer.
 

 

 

Right click on raster layer and create new raster layer, name it crayon layer and accept the defaults.


Click on paintbrush in the tools palette, in the panel click on the arrow next to presets and in the dropdown menu, pick crayon. Depending on the size of your picture, you may want to reduce the default brush size for the crayon settings. I changed my size to 3.

 

 

PSP 8 settings



 
The method for PSP 7 is slightly different as it doesn't have the crayon preset for the brush tool. See the picture to the right for the setting for the brush tool. Adjust your brush size to what you need for your picture.  Everything else for PSP 7 is the same for the rest of the tutorial.
PSP 7 settings


 

Pick the foreground color you want to use, this will be the color of your crayon. I used scarlet #F10909 for the body and feathers, pale gold #E5D763 for the legs, orange #FE6920 for the beak, brown
#964444 for the branch charcoal #404040 for the face and black for the eye.
 


 
Making sure you are in the crayon layer, go over the black lines with the "crayon", changing colors as needed, go in fairly short strokes, so if you have to undo a line you don't undo a lot of work.
Don't worry about hitting all the lines exactly as you will delete the black lines later.
 
Once you are done, go to the layer panel and delete raster one. This will leave the picture on a transparent background. Go over the crayon lines again to even them out and smooth them over. Once you are happy with that, you can either save as a gif and use on the transparent background or flood fill the background with the color, gradient or pattern of your choice. You can also color in the picture with the crayon tool.

To flood fill the background, right click on crayon layer in layer panel and add raster layer. Drag this new raster layer underneath the crayon layer in the layer panel. Making sure it is the layer highlighted, click on the flood fill tool (the bucket) and fill with the color, gradient or pattern of choice. If it is too dark, you can right click in the layer panel, add another layer over the background one, and flood fill with white, then turn down the opacity in the layer panel.

 
When happy with the result, right click on one of the layers in the layer panel and merge all (flatten). Save as a jpg.

You are finished!

You have produced your own crayon masterpiece!



 
I found this gradient a little dark so I added a new raster layer, flood filled it with white and turned down the opacity on this white layer to about 70.

This is how it ended up.


   

 

 

These tutorials are all my own creations and any resemblance to any other tutorial is
purely coincidental and unintentional.
Feel free to share any of my tutorials on this site by a link back to my site,
but do not copy and send the entire tutorial to anyone or any group.
©2004 Ellie's Treasures