We’ve put together a new set of Studio Artist 3.5 Pencil Sketch Paint Synthesizer Presets and some additional Pencil Sketch Paint Action Sequences that are available for download.  These presets show off some different approaches to creating pencil sketch renditions of source images in various shading styles.

 

These new presets are primarily designed to be used with automatic action painting (as opposed to manual interactive drawing).  Depending on the size of your working canvas you may want to adjust the path length of the strokes (Path Shape control panel) and possibly the max number of strokes (Path Start control panel) for optimal results.  These presets tend to focus more on showing off some different approaches to creating pencil sketch shading effects as opposed to outline sketches.

 

Artist’s often work with their hand shading in a pencil sketch to accentuate the positive and negative space in the image they are creating.  One approach to emulating this particular stylistic effect in Studio Artist is to enhance your source image prior to doing the actual pencil sketch.  Some of the Paint Action Sequence presets show off some different approaches to creating this kind of effect in a pencil sketch.  The source image is enhanced with one of more image operations, and then the enhanced image is placed in the source area using the Canvas Image to Source Image menu.  Then the enhanced source image is used as the source for the pencil sketch painting steps.  

 

You can configure a single PASeq to do all of these different steps in a single action script.  You could also combine together different pencil shading and outline sketch effects to create a final artistic rendition style.  Keep in mind that if you modify the source area image in your PASeq, you will need to reload the original source image after you run the PASeq to avoid enhancing already enhanced images multiple times.