Crayons

Your best bet, Scott?

Get a talented child to do a REAL crayon drawing, a child who will nominally be able to draw what you ask.

Adults are rarely able to recreate the visual naiveté that children’s drawings exhibit, and it ends up looking horribly contrived.

If that’s not an option, I’d suggest Corel’s Painter for it’s brilliant ability to mimic real media.

the actual content of the project would not be childrens art, it is actually web graphics for a customer site, but I’m trying to incorporate the kind of off center disproportionate crayon outlines that would suggest a 1st graders art project. Would Corel have something helpful to create this?

I have a six year old who charges very reasonable rates. <g>

And you can get Timothy even cheaper (He ACTS like a 6 year old now and then). 😛

Scott…

What version of PS do you have? I’m using CS, so what I’m about to suggest might or might not help.

What you want to do is load your Special Effect brush presets. Choose a brush called Granite Flow.

By itself, this creates a pretty decent crayon effect, but if you apply a layer blend mode like Multiply (to knock out the whites) and throw a bevel/emboss layer style… you can help accentuate the crayon effect a bit more. Want to add more texture? Apply a Lighting Effects filter (set to directional) and choose a color channel.

Another preset brush you could try (I use version 7) is in the "natural brushes 2" preset. There are 2 in there called chalk dark and chalk light. They don’t look much like crayon unless you first go into the brush palette and under shape dynamics options change the angle jitter to 100%.

Another alternative if you can’t find a brush you like may be to just get yourself a box of crayolas. Draw the picture and then scan it into photoshop. Once in photoshop you can tweak the colors and do whatever with it. I struggled to get a watercolor look for a project until I just went down to Walmart and got some Crayola watercolor paints. Sometimes the real thing is just easier.

The Conan O’Brien late night TV show occasionally features fake humorous kid’s crayon drawings, that are obviously done by their art department (due to adult content.) But they have really captured the look of little kid’s crayon art. I don’t know if they use real crayons or special software techniques. I suspect software.

— Burton —