I'm now trying to perfect a black pencil sketch style. It should have black lines (not just one direction graphic pen style), and a little bit of smudge to generate shadow area.

I'd like to have suggestions, and critique on this image here.

And yes, I have playing with Danny's settings as well, they're nice (not used here, these are unique - even made an new thin, sharp, slightly blurred edge brush too (see previous post for the brushes)).

I sure like where you're going here. I especially like how the face came out (skin, eyes, nose, mouth).

All the little "white spots" within the hair and shadowy areas (for example the right side of her face, near the temple area) were distracting to me.

Possibilities:
* When you render the effect style(s) perhaps use Background = Grayscale.
-or-
* Duplicate the original layer, desaturate it (if it's not already BW), drag it to the top of the layer stack, add a hide-all layer mask and blend in some tone in the highlight areas.

When you get this method worked out, it's one that should be spelled out in detail in the new "portraits and sketches" forum.

~Danny~

I agree with you about the white spots - but having a greyscale background, or just a grey background made the picture look like just a desaturated version of, say, "charcoal default".

I'm looking more towards this attached image (a real sketch).

I'm trying at the moment to get an edge mask, then blur that outwards, then use lat mask to make the same area semitransparent on a layer, with a PE waterwash setting underneath.

L3 - mask
L2 - pencil
L1 - PE waterwash of pencil layer

That way the image has defined strokes, and these strokes have a 'wet' look outside them (sort of like a mountain in profile: white-soft-soft-harder-harder-hard-softer-softer-soft-white). So a sharp stroke still exists, bit it's edges are blended (unlike plain blurring - with this even the stroke is blurred).

One other thing to try to eliminate the white-spots -- use a mid-tone solid gray for the background. Many graphite artists start by toning the paper!

-Jeff

It's an idea - what I've started to play with now is expanding on my blur idea.

The results are getting there (I'll post later, a bit tires now, it's late).

What I've got now is a background with light grey fading darker and darker as it gets closer (in distance, not tonal) to the actual image lines (on an upper layer).