If you start drawing and sketching, the natural thing for anyone active online is to post it online. You're proud of your latest drawings. You may want to blog them, or post them in art forums for critique and feedback. But using your scanner is a no-brainer, right?

From the day you first got one, you maybe read the manual and learned how to put the art upside down on the glass, use the software included, click the right settings to get the size and resolution you want and just make it work. That gets to be second nature fast, especially if you draw a lot.

The problem is that a pencil drawing that looked fine on paper can come out way too light and mostly vanish when you see the scan. See example of a raw scan below.

Any scanner will lighten your drawing by at least one full value step, maybe two. Most of the lighter areas and lines will fade to invisibility or near invisibility. What was a good drawing can start to look like a wussy fainthearted excuse for a drawing by someone who's afraid to touch the paper with the pencil. Ack! What the heck can I do about it?

There's two things I've found I can do. One is to use Gimp, which you can download free at http://www.gimp.org to darken the drawing and retrieve at least some of the light areas. 

There are two or three functions on the Gimp menu that I use to clean up a scan. First, I go to the Color drop-down menu on the window with the scan after I open it, even though it's a black and white pencil drawing. I choose Hue-Saturation.

There are three slides in the dialog box that appears. Top one is Hue, irrelevant for a black and white drawing but can be important if I've used colored pencils and the color isn't true. About a third of the time I have to click the color one step to the right to get it accurate. Another third of the time I need to use Irregular Selection Tool to select just one area in the art to change the color on and leave the rest what it is. The other third, the colors are just fine but it's still too light.

So moving down, the second slide is Lightness. Click that over one or two steps to the left, which darkens the scan. This may retrieve lost lines and shading areas in itself, but will also darken the white background till it's on gray. That may not look pretty but if I'm doing a demo to teach someone how to draw, they need to see the lines rather than appreciate the sheer beauty of my demo sketch. In person of course, they can just look at it and that faded excuse for a design you need to squint to see is perfectly visible.

The third slide is Saturation and that can be useful too if I'm feeling perfectionist. Shoving that slide all the way over to the left will turn the drawing to pure grayscale, which I did not do on my Eye Exercise. You can see random blues and pinks and browns in the shading on Eye Exercise that weren't there in the graphite original because the scanner put them in. Reducing Saturation to zero eliminates this effect. Sometimes I want to.

The next step is one I always, always do along with Hue-Saturation. I go back up to the Color menu and choose Brightness-Contrast.

This has two slides, one for Brightness and one for Contrast. What I do for a given drawing varies because this one isn't as formulaic.

First I look at Contrast. I'll click up and look at it, click down and look at it, balancing whether lightening the darks is worth bringing up the vanishing light areas, or whether strengthening the darks is worth losing a little again on the light areas. I like my darks to show up, so if I do anything with that slide I'm more likely to add contrast. It will strengthen the darks very dramatically on either a photo or a sketch.

Then if I reduce Brightness, that can bring back the light areas without losing the contrast. However, like Lightness, it will also gray the white areas. If I lowered Contrast to retrieve more of the light lines, then raising Brightness will sometimes reduce the graying effect without making the light lines disappear.

This gets to be an intuitive process. I use those two functions to improve the scan whether it's a phone photo, camera photo or art scan routinely, with more attention to Hue if it's a color artwork but sometimes pushing Saturation to zero for black and white art.

Below is the same sketchbook page after I did my best with Gimp to make it more visible.

I did mention there were two things I do to make my art easy to post online. One is to give it the best Gimp treatment that I can, so that it's closest to how it really looks.

The other is to adjust my drawing techniques to knowing how the scans look afterward. Soft pencils make a darker mark than medium or hard pencils. Hard pencils make a lighter mark but can be sharpened to a finer point and make a thinner more precise line -- and they are less smudgy when you go in to paint over the faint thin lines. 

That means if I'm sketching under watercolor, they are less likely to dissolve and turn the paint gray or blur out from those fine lines. They vanish easier. So I use different pencils for different purposes.

Graphite pencils have a letter and usually also a number. H pencils are the hardest, the higher the number, the lighter and thinner a line they will produce. In sets, the hardest pencil is usually a 6H or a 9H or something in between. These super-hard pencils are like drawing with a cobweb or something. You can barely see the line but you can get absolute precision for something like drafting, where you're going to ink over those lines. They also erase pretty well unless you dig in hard with heavy pressure trying to get more of a mark.

The lower the number, the closer to a normal pencil it is. 2H isn't far from a normal pencil. H pencils are only two steps up from a normal No. 2 pencil, the kind you get free at a grocery store or bank for filling in forms. F is a weirdness. H stands for Hard, so you get increasing numbers of Hardness. F just means Fine Point, which is exactly one step up from Normal.

Normal pencils are an HB. That's what the No. 2 normal pencil that comes in a box of a dozen for a dollar at normal stores is. HB is the versatile, middle of the spectrum, average pencil that can handle doing both fine lines and smudgy shading. Because they are so cheap and ubiquitous -- less than a dime each versus the usual price of a dollar or more for fine art graphite pencils, a lot of artists use them for sketching.

HB is not dark enough to scan well by itself without a lot of work. It can be fine if what you're doing is flat dark areas you filled in with heavy pressure and heavy-pressure strong lines. Even then though, depending on your paper, you might see half the drawing fade out to become hard to see online. 

Even one step darker into B will make your drawing more visible. B stands for Blacker. The higher the number, the softer and darker the graphite. I like using the super soft 6B to 9B range when I'm going to scan pencil art as finished art because I'm pretty sure even the smudged values will pretty much come through -- though I will lose the lightest part of the shading if I was smudging, I will still get most of it and the darks will come up very strong. The eye exercise I did at the top was done with a 9B pencil.

When you're looking at sets of artist pencils, a Drafting set will usually have lots of Hard pencils and a few soft ones at the bottom, while a Drawing or Sketching set will have all the B range and only a few H range. I finally got the big set that had both because I like having my full range of pencil hardness handy in one place and kept picking up the wrong tins. Plus getting two tins meant that I had duplicates of the rarely-used middle of the range pencils. 

Fair warning -- soft pencils wear down really fast. Because they're soft you need to sharpen them often and they get used up quick. Right now the 9B pencil I used for that eye exercise is a 2" stub in a pencil holder.

But wait, there's more!

You can get darker than 9B pencils!

Design Ebony pencils have some carbon mixed in with the graphite. This makes the darks even blacker, they tend to be soft but firm and hold a good fine point. If I had only one art pencil to use with my sketchbook, it would be the Ebony Pencil. I discovered these in art class in high school when my teacher gave me one. I loved it and used it up down to the tiniest stub, because it did hold a fine point for details but gave such beautiful deep darks that didn't gray out with the shimmery graphite texture.

Then I found out the dang things were over a dollar each at the art store and it was like pulling teeth to get my grandmother to buy them for me. "But you can get a whole box of pencils for that. What's so special about this one?"

"Well, it's darker and it draws better, it's just for drawing." I had to demonstrate it again just about every art store trip and go through that discussion. 

In the same category as the Ebony Pencil, there's also the Wolff's Carbon Pencil in several degrees of hardness, there are Sketch Pencils from Conte and Prismacolor as well as Derwent Drawing Pencils or just a black Prismacolor colored pencil and the Ultimate Scannable Pencil: charcoal pencils.

All of these will give darker darks and shade up through darker medium tones. The trick to drawing scannably is to keep the light areas in balance so that you're not using the Invisible Level at all, shading darker where that light-light area comes in. Or doing the design so strong that it still looks good when the lightest lights drop out to white.

The same thing applies when scanning watercolor paintings, usually with the nasty twist that certain colors also vanish to white even if they're strong. Friends online remark on how beautiful my strong darks and strong colors are in my watercolors. They're that strong because if I did delicate soft light watercolors, I got paintings that looked patchy and had giant white areas for blue sky or purple mountains.

So in painting and colored pencils, use bold colors and learn which colors your scanner chokes on. It's different per scanner. Some will drop out certain specific shades of blue, others pick up the blue fine but turn yellow-greens into bright yellow or medium green at random. Others flatten all reds and oranges to the same red-orange.

It can be tough. The longer you use a particular scanner and learn its quirks and gamut issues though, the easier it is to draw to the scanner and have your results come out looking good online. I'm far too vain to keep half my drawings to myself and go lightly. So bring on the Ebony pencil and the 9B stub and the charcoal! That's a whole lot easier to share!

Above is an example of a drawing done for the scanner. I used Derwent Graphitint tinted graphite wash pencils, using a couple of different dark colors in the silver shiny parts and making the value contrasts strong, while using the black Graphitint for the black glass gems and the Port pencil for the red gem in the center. I washed the gems and ran a little water into some areas on the silver part to shade it better.

Metallic effects can scan very well if you keep those dramatic value changes. Deep darks right next to bright white will always jump out and look shiny, while deep darks shading to the bright white will also look shiny if you follow exactly what the object looks like and what's reflecting on it. This scan looks very close to the original, though it wasn't high resolution it does read true online.

Below is an example of a charcoal pencil drawing. It's very easy to use charcoal and tinted charcoal pencils to get scanworthy sketches, so if you have a good initial drawing in HB pencil that you doodled at work, consider redrawing it in charcoal to scan.

Bison is a loose sketch. I deliberately let some white show through even in shaded areas, and let the lightest values go entirely to white here and there. I did not have to darken this so much that the background turned gray, though I did have to tweak the color a little in Gimp to get it true to the exact colors I used in the drawing. 

Mostly I'm posting this to show how an easy, loose, even light drawing with smudged shading that didn't take as long as grinding dark pencil into solid large dark areas can scan well using charcoal or tinted charcoal pencils. They're no messier than soft graphite -- if you use assorted fingers for shading you will have to wash your hands or let your cat wash your fingers. 

Graphite and normal charcoal won't actually hurt the cat, but I avoid giving him the opportunity to lick anything colored off of me since I don't know the effects of various pigments on a creature that's only 15lb -- he's much smaller and any health effects would be much more devastating. So don't pet the cat or dog with dirty hands from art either, especially when it's color. Much better to keep a wet towel handy to substitute for the cat's tongue.

Then you can annoy him by petting him with damp hands and get that dirty look and immediate-wash reaction anyway.

I hope this Hub has given you some ideas on how to handle scanning your pencil art -- or preparing your pencil art before scanning. If you have a good sketch in HB pencil, it may not take long once you get home to scan it to take out the dark B range pencils and just go over the dark areas again, shade all of it a little darker. You got it right the first time, so shading it a little stronger is just adapting what's there.

Cameras, including phone cameras, can sometimes get truer color and values than a scanner. The trick to that is setting it up with a tripod so it won't get blurry and lining up the display so it is exactly parallel to the camera with lines as straight as possible on the sides of the art. You can crop a photo into the art, but if it's even slightly tilted you get curved or slanted edges and distortions in the middle of your drawing. So I do usually use my scanner for anything 9" x 12" and smaller, because it's a pain to set up for photographing art and doesn't always get it as bright as a scanner will.

Enjoy!