So, I took the scanned sketch and messed around with it whilst trying to retain the spirit of the drawing. I cleaned some of the line and then dropped it into illustrator and ran a "Live Trace" on it, vectorising the lines. I do this quite often as it tends to create interesting smoothening and straightening to my line work. Sometimes it sucks, this time I preferred the "traced" version. I took the new file back into photoshop and copied and pasted the buildings and lights around as I felt I wanted more city.The next stage for me is tone. I draw (paint? I use paths so I count that as drawing) the tonal shapes on different layers so I can mess around with the strengths of them later. I change my colours all the time at this stage and keep a "hue and saturation" filter with a saturation value of "0" so I can check between a black and white view and a colour view to make sure the colours I pick read correctly tonally.
I then thought I'd try a thinner composition having made the image fatter. I wanted to emphasise the buildings as skyscrapers more so I re-jigged the image to be taller.
Ok, more to come!
