Digital line art experiments

I enjoy working with black and white printouts of various photos that I've taken, using parts of them as graphic elements for other projects. Recently I decided to work through several different methods of creating digital line art versions of a photo in order to be able to look at the results side by side.

There is no one method of creating a digital black and white drawing that will be perfect for every situation. In fact, I found that as I moved forward with several future quilt projects, I had to try applying each of the methods in turn until I found which one would work best in each case, highlighting the particular details that were important to me. In a couple of weeks, I'll be showing you one of those art quilt projects.

Here is the original shot that I used for the experiments below.

1. Smart blur method
Duplicate
Filter > Smart blur, edge only
Invert if needed
Flatten and create a 0 layer
Delete all white pixels
Add a stroke if needed

2. Find edges method
Duplicate
Filter > Stylize > Find edges
Desaturate
Invert if needed
Add levels adjustment layer and blow out image
Flatten and create a 0 layer
Delete all white pixels
Add a stroke if needed

3. Combination method
Duplicate
Filter > Stylize > Find edges
Smart blur (see #1 above)
Invert if needed
Flatten and create a 0 layer
Delete all white pixels
Add a stroke if needed

Copyright 2012 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact.