Lineless Illustration

Lineless illustrations can be easily made by taking a traditional sketch and bringing it into a digital art software. For this task i chose this drawing i made a while ago. I took a simple photograph and cropped out any unnecessary elements.

Then i had to treat the image with adjustments, levels, brightness, hue and saturation. I adjusted these sliders until the line art popped out from the page, This will make it easier to see your sketch when you put it on a multiply layer over a darker backdrop.

Now that your image is workable, you need to figure out your light source. Placing the sketch layer on multiply place in a darker background as your base tone and then with an airbrush or marker brush place in your middle/lighter values, at this stage you don't need to worry about the details, we will refine this later. Finally place in the lightest tones using the same technique. This will allow you to check if your value composition is good.

Going back and forth with decreasing the sketch opacity and brush size, refine edges of your values on top of your value composition. At its simplest, digital painting is all about refining details further and further, bit by bit until you are happy with the final result. Using this technique i created the drawing below. I would like to go back in and clean up the gun and add in a stronger highlight to really push the contrast, however i was a little short on time and so i will have to return back to this at a later date. For now though i really enjoyed this exercise and i think its interesting to see how this technique makes my art style look.