A Scanner Darkly Effect on Adobe Illustrator

Director Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly impressed audiences with a stunning 2D animation style that mixes heavy blacks lines with shapes of solid color to represent a realistic image. I used Adobe Illustrator’s pencil tool and shapes of solid color to imitate the graphic novel styling.

Here’s a photo of John and me on our vacation in Miami, Florida a few years ago. I decided to use this picture because it’s one of my favorites from our early years of dating.

First, I began by drawing thin black outlines around major forms and filled in the darkest regions.

Next, I filled in the darkest areas of the photo with black and shades of gray. Coloring my purse was a good warmup exercise because it didn’t require too much detail or time.

It took me about an hour to get comfortable with adding color to my hair and his shirt.

Then, I attempted to fill in the skin tones. This was challenging because the eye dropper tool on Illustrator kept picking up colors that were too dark compared to the actual shade. I had to play around with the colors until they meshed well.

Filling in John’s face took the entire day. I had a hard time with the shadow on the left side of his face because it was really dark compared to the right. I was really close to giving up and leaving our faces blank, hahaha.

Three days later, we have the finished product. I filled in the background relatively quick and used Photoshop to blur and lighten so we could standout in contrast.

This was my first attempt at digital inking so there’s a lot of room for improvement. However, I don’t think I’ll be working on another one of these for a while because I’m pretty burnt out from this exercise. I’m just really glad that I gained a lot of experience using Adobe Illustrator!

For full instructions on this tutorial, check out Layers Magazine.

Possibly Related Posts:

• WordPress Upgrade is Unstable
• Extract Color Palettes
• Gravatar
• WordPress Subscribe-to-Comments Plugin
• Abstract Watercolor in Adobe Photoshop