Welcome to Draw Tip Tuesday. Here's your weekly dose of inspiration to build a
creative habit, one drawing at a time, brought to you by sketchbook skool.
Welcome to Draw Tip Tuesday. A bit different again than usually because I
wanted to show you a few approaches on how to photograph your art, your
sketchbook for social media. Maybe you have a scanner. Well that's great
but it might be a little bit much if you just want to do a quick post of your
work. Then a camera could be handier but if you don't have a camera and just have
your phone at hand, your smartphone there's a lot you can do and your photos
of your art can be pretty good especially for sharing quickly on social
media or anywhere else. So let's show you a few
tricks that I really like doing and tell you a little bit about it. What is really
important when you are photographing your art is your lighting and the best
lighting actually is daylight. I am right now
just in front of the window. I put my sketchbook on the windowsill and as you
can see there's a really nice sort of equal lighting coming in. Of course if
the sun is shining, that's quite different. The shadows could be really
hard. Overall it's best to just find a place
where you can get a lot of daylight and then you are actually kind of good to go
to take your picture. So let's do that. If you are framing your photo make sure
that your phone is at the same angle or parallel actually to your sketchbook
because as you can see from here my phone is a little bit like this, but the
sketchbook is like this and you can see the distortion here happening. There's a
lot of perspective in there so you want to be right from the top. What you can do
is go very close, but two things can happen there. You can get quite some
distortion as you can see. The wide-angle can distort a little bit
and also you might be in the light, so the best thing to do is back up just a
little bit and then you can zoom in a little. Now my phone tends to make the
photos a little bit too dark to my taste. So what you can do is just tap the image
and then there's a little sun icon and you can change the exposure and then you
just take the picture and there you go. Now holding it still, framing it well, and
then not be shaky while you take the picture can be a little bit tricky so
what I often do is I select the three-second option that you can usually
use for a selfie for example and then it will take a picture 3 seconds after you
actually hit the button so that gives you a little bit of time to make sure
everything is in frame and maybe even hold your breath. The light that I have
now is pretty ideal but sometimes you will see that there is a little bit of a
difference of gradation so because the light comes from here then this part
will be lighter than this part and there's a little trick for that. You can
use just a simple sketch book to just bounce off the light and you can already
see the difference in the cast shadow here. If I put that over here, if I place
it over here, then here the light comes from here and it bounces off of
both pages and it fills in the shadows. See the difference that can be really
helpful. Okay here's another problem that you could run into - this sketchbook for
example, it won't lie flat so what you can do is use a little clamp like that
Put it in a corner and then you have a nice flat surface and then you can take
your photo.
But maybe you don't like this being in your picture so there's another way,
that is using the frame. Just a simple glass frame of a picture frame.
Now this flattens out your sketchbook very well but there's a little bit of a
tricky bit about it. As you can see there is a reflection, but you should be
able to get away with it especially if the room around you isn't too light. Then
you won't be seen in the reflection of actually the mirror that this glass
frame is.
That works. What if you're in the sunlight, in bright sunlight or you
have one big light source that's coming from one side? Well as you can see the
light source is from up there and it casts a big shadow. Now I can do my trick
again with the glass to flatten this out so I can really get my picture well in
frame, move it a little bit so i have more space to show you. Again we can fill up those
shadows a little bit with our bouncing light. Can you see the difference just a
little bit? One thing that I almost forgot to tell you that you might even
not notice is that when you have a strong light source from one side and
you start taking a picture, you might actually cast a shadow. So make sure
that you are not between the light source and your subject because casting
a shadow will just mess up your picture. So make sure you are on the
right side and that you can take a picture that way without casting an
extra shadow that you really don't need.
And then when you find your photo in your photo app on the phone then there's
this little tool that can help you actually crop it before you share it
online. Here's the crop tool and you can just pull the banners and even turn it a
little bit if you weren't, you didn't take it straight and you just crop it.
And then you are done. It looks like you have scanned the picture.
You can share it online. So there you go! I hope this has been helpful and I hope
that you will be sharing your art online and you can even hashtag it #drawtiptuesday
or maybe @sketchbookskool so we can see what you are doing. And if you
want to learn more about illustration, about creating projects outside of your
sketchbook and keeping track of your progress and your process then join
Illustration Nation. It's a fantastic course. It's brand spanking new on
sketchbook school. So check it out and go to sketchbookskool.com See you next
week!