There’s nothing better than showing your drawings and sketches in the best way possible. Here are some tips and techniques on how to make them look their best.
This post is inspired by one of the questions I had after giving a drawing workshop the other night: what are the best ways of capturing what we sketch, and getting them into formats we can use and share?
Great question. These days, it’s dead easy to capture and share your sketches using your smartphone or tablet, but it’s worth knowing a few finer details if you want to get the best results. Here are some tips and app recommendations to get you capturing your sketches like a pro. All are free, and (unless otherwise stated) all are available for both iOS and Android.
Just so you can see how the results of these recommendations compare, here is a photo of my sketch, taken with my iPhone:
It depends on how you’re going to use the sketches
First things first: you have to know what you want to capture your sketches for. It’s all about where your sketches will end up:
Instant sharing on social media or your intranet – Snap away! That camera phone is fine
Capturing for project work or for a presentation – You’ll want your images nice, white and clean, in a way that fits your workflow
Enhancing, colouring and editing – A smooth vectorised image is best
Instant sharing
If you just want an image of your sketches to share on Instagram, X and so on (or maybe your work intranet or chat room), the camera app on your smartphone is fine. Some pro tips:
- Always get your sketch in as much light as possible
- Watch out for shadows of either you or your phone
- Try dynamic angles for added interest
- Include the edges of the paper or sketchbook, and the markers you used; people love to know more about the process behind the magic of the final sketch
Capturing for project work or for a presentation
Your camera phone probably won’t give you a sharp clean bright squared-off image, so go for a scanner app like:
CamScanner – for iOs or Android
Office Lens – for iOS or Android
Scanbot
TinyScanner
Both of these are mainly meant for document scanning (as well as receipts and business cards), but their image scanning is great too. Both have great edge detection and perspective fixing… so no more wonky images at odd angles to tidy up! What’s more, both include optical character recognition (OCR), so depending on how neat your writing is, they will automatically capture that in an editable format too.
Office Lens is perfect if you already use OneNote or OneDrive, and you can export your scans as editable Office files. It also has a great feature of being able to toggle between ‘Photo’ view, ‘Document’ view and ‘Whiteboard’ view, depending on what result you’re after. The ‘Whiteboard’ view can give amazing results of your scrawls on a whiteboard, even in a dim room. But beware! As you can see in the demo image below, coloured shapes end up looking pretty janky.
Note that Scanbot and TinyScanner knock out the colour.
Enhancing, colouring and editing
Maybe you need to capture your sketches to tidy up a lot more in an image editing application? Or add colours, or combine sketches together? If that’s the case, any of the scanning apps above are fine, but try Adobe Capture (for iOS or Android), and capture your sketches as vectorised images. It does a tremendous job of cleaning up, clarifying and smoothing out the lines of the sketch.
Try them out
I hope these tips have given you some ideas for how to get better results when capturing and sharing images of your sketches. What works best for you?