Sharpie Art Social Media Backgrounds Part 1

Have I ever told you how much I love sharpies?

My obsession started when I was in Year 8 at high school and was teaching myself about graphic design. I really loved pop art and the cool stencilling look of street art by Banksy and the like.

Back then in country town Karratha, the computer programs to draw this stuff from scratch wasn't easily accessible, so I made do with the humble sharpie.

Since then I've moved on to lines and vecors in Photoshop (the topic of a post to come), but sometimes I still get a kick out of doing it from scratch.

I've modernised the tutorial a little and I'm using the sharpie art to support my social media posts, particularly those on Facebook and my Twitter banner. (Which I will explore in part two).

PART 1

Get creative with the sharpie! You'll need a black sharpie with an extra fine point and an A5 sketch pad.

Tip: Don't get all inspired and start with an A4 or A3 pad. You'll be kicking yourself at how long the artwork will take.

I drew some lined patterns to give you an idea how easy it is. I also found some previous sketches from my Owl Phase that I scanned in.

Scan into Photoshop.

You'll find that while the pens give a nice clean line on the paper, when you scan it the lumps and bumps become apparent.

This one stretched me a little in my Photoshop skills. I searched around the web until I found this great tutorial on how to refine lines in a scan. The instructions are quite clear, but it still took me a while to figure out completely around all the lingo.

Here's a scan before the Photoshop tutorial:

And a scan afterwards. You can see all the noise in the background has gone and the lines are smoother.

Tomorrow I'll how you Part 2, when I put the images into Facebook and Twitter!