It will give you smooth, hand-drawn style lines that are great for painting over in Photoshop.

A word of caution: auto tracing takes some practice and fiddling with settings. Once you've opened your image in Illustrator, go to Window>Image Trace. I can scale a vector infinitely but I can't scale a sketch (even a high-res scan) infinitely. This technique maintains the hand-drawn qualities of a sketch while having the advantages of a vector image. We're going to use the auto trace feature in Illustrator. Next up, Illustrator! You can save your current file and open it in Illustrator, or take the lazy route like I do: select & copy your image in Photoshop, open a new file in Illustrator and paste your file there. They don't need to be perfectly black, just black enough to not be white! Once my background is white, I use the Dodge tool to darken up any grey tones so that they are dark enough. This takes that tone and any similar tones and makes them white. In this image, it's in the lower left corner. Using the white eyedropper (on the far right) select the darkest of the grey color. To do this, go to Image>Adjustments>Levels. Now that I've erased most of the grey paper color, I can get the line art closer to pure black & white. We'll use the good ol' lesson doll to demonstrate. It's a brilliant method and produces really nice results. If you don't have access to Illustrator, I strongly recommend Rachel's line work tutorial on Paper Thin Personas. Most of my work is done in Illustrator, it's a program I understand, and it gives me amazingly sharp detail in a way I can't achieve with any other methods. I used both Photoshop and Illustrator to create my line work. This one is really good quick results & ideal for simple drawings.

It's so quick & easy it feels like cheating! There are other techniques, of course, and I've gone over several of them before. It's the technique I used on the December dolls. This week, I want to share my method for creating quick, clean line work. I enjoyed the challenge of working in Photoshop and last week I shared my technique for making quick plaids. It's important to keep skills current and revisiting fundamentals is a great way to do that. That's part of the reason why I created my December paper doll series in Photoshop. I don't spend a lot of time in Photoshop.

Illustrator line art