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Though I painted the bald eagle portrait, “Sentinel”, using a Wacom digital tablet, the method I use comes directly from my many years as a traditional watercolor painter. In the traditional method, I would trace a photograph, using a lightbox or a projector, and then transfer the drawing to watercolor paper. This is a long and tedious process, but I can’t paint without a complete line drawing. I never liked doing the drawing part. I just wanted to get painting!
So when I began to paint digitally, I was thrilled to find a way to create the line art in just a few minutes, rather than days. The line art can be made visible or invisible, at will. It can be faded out as the painting progresses, and then deleted at the end.
In this walkthrough, I’ll show you my technique for creating a quick and accurate line drawing using Photoshop (CS3 or later). If you have an earlier version, there’s a work around. If you prefer to create the line art manually, by all means do so, and just skip ahead to the next section, where I will show how I applied a transparent watercolor technique to digital painting.
Creating the Line Art
 Open the file in Photoshop, and then duplicate the background layer (click and drag the Background layer down to the duplicate layer icon in the Layers palette). We need to turn this duplicate into a black and white image, and the best way to do this is to use the Black and White image adjustment, available since CS3. (If you have an earlier version, use Image > Adjustments > Desaturate.) Go Image > Adjustments > Black & White.
In the Black and White dialogue, choose “Maximum White” from the presets. Depending on the photo, you may find that another preset works better. The goal is to maintain the full range of values from dark to white, with as much detail showing as possible. Rename “Background Copy” as Image-Adj-Black&White Max White. This way your layers become self-documenting, for future reference.
Copy the Image-Adj-Black&White Max White layer (click and drag the layer down to the new layer icon), and Invert it (go Image > Adjustments > Invert). Rename the layer “Copy Inverted”. Change this layer’s blending mode from “Normal” to “Color Dodge.” The image should vanish, leaving you with a blank & white image. Sometimes (and this is one of those times), a high contrast image with dark blacks will not work well with Color Dodge. Try, instead, Linear Dodge. Use whichever makes the image disappear. If a little bit is still showing, don’t worry.
Now, with a bit of Photoshop magic, we will create a line drawing from this apparently empty image. Make sure the Copy Inverted layer is active. Go to Filter > Other > Minimum. This is a filter you’ve probably never used before.
The Minimum filter dialog shows some odd, blocky stuff in its preview. Just ignore that, and pay attention to the image itself. Slide the Radius setting down to 1, and if the lines are too faint, keep sliding to the right until the lines are distinct. If you use too high a Radius setting, the lines may become too heavy. Don’t worry if the lines are rather pale, as they are here. We’ll darken them up next. Click OK.
Add a Curves Adjustment Layer (go Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves). Click the middle of the curve line, and drag it down just until the lines are darker. Save the file, and then flatten the image (Layers > Flatten), and save it with a new name. The line drawing is done!
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