Lately I've been working on different ways to turn some of my physical art into digital elements for my mini zines. I got good at turning simple doodle designs into a solid file to send to the laser, use as an overlay, or just as a digital sticker.
Here's how I do it:
1. Make a Doodle.
This is the most fun part of the entire process. Enjoy it.
2. Take a picture of it as high contras as you can. Make sure your phone's shadow isn't crossing directly over it.
3. You can use your computer for this, but I use my phone first to get the file as close to what I want as possible before booting up the big box.
Here I'm using Snapseed, it's free. I use the light/contrast adjustments, crop, and a tiny bit of the heal brush just to clean up extra dots off the page.
After these settings It's basically black and white. I then crop it down to as close to what I'm making as possible.
4. Since I need photoshop to make the background transparent I do one more step just to make sure everything truly is black and white and there's no guessing: Threshold. For this shape it's simple but you may need to adjust the sliders depending on how complicated your design is.
Don't forget to never name your layers ever.
5. There's a bunch of different ways to knock a background off a subject but for this particular project I'm going to use 'select color range' and select black. This is why we made everything an absolute range.
Your settings may vary but for small shapes like I'm doing here it really l doesn't matter what numbers you plug in.
6. Copy the pixels selected and then paste it on its own layer or file. You will now have a completely original solid design with full transparency!
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Originally published to Patreon November 8, 2023
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