Pencil Sketch to Smooth Digital Shading

As an option you can add colour to your newly rendered image.
For this type of artwork I usually just create a couple of flat colour layers beneath the pencil layer, and change it’s blend mode to multiply. This effectively makes all of the white of that layer completely transparent.

The image below shows my Layers Palette. You can see I've chosen 4 different colours to make up the skin tone.

I then proceed to erase sections of each coloured layer. Depending on which areas you erase, the layers beneath will start to show through, and you will get a good range of colour. This will give you quick and fairly good result.

The final step is to add highlights to the image. With the multiply blend mode active, you lose the white of your original image, so we have to go through this step to bring up the highlights and solidify the image.
I usually create another layer under the original and use a soft brush with the opacity lowered to add highlights. Creating new layers with more opacity on the brush with give you stronger, sharper defined highlights, like the eyes and tip of the nose.

As you can see I've decreased the saturation of the skin in the final image and added in an industrial background.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful. Maybe this will encourage you to pull out some of those old pencil sketches that you have hidden away and rework them in photoshop.

-Troy Packer