This post is the start of a series on how the post-processing workflow for my sketchnotes has taken shape.

Introduction

Over the past few years I have been using sketchnotes on and off, but for some reason it just never stuck. I liked the experience of creating them, but got kind of lost in post production. How should I handle a note once it was drawn? Where and how should I store it? How should I efficiently scan and touch up these notes?

Lately I have been consolidating my skills by taking on a slew of on-line courses (the reasoning behind this warrants a separate post). During the second course in a series of 10 on Hadoop it hit me:

D’oh! I Should be practicing my sketchnote taking skills!

So for the latter 9 courses I persevered and the notes got more engaging over this period. The results, with a specific focus on the post-production will be the subject of this series of posts.

Workflow

The sketchnotes were made with a black PILOT Fineliner in an A5 hardback notebook. I didn’t add color to them while sketching.

My post-production workflow ended up with these basic steps:

  1. Scan the sketchnotes. For this series I chose to scan at a relatively low 300dpi. This left me with approx. 3500x2500px images, enough resolution for my intended purposes (digital archiving and distribution).
  2. Clean up and add color accents. Adding color in post-production turned out to be a big bonus. Cleaning images is a breeze if you only have black and white to deal with. For this step I use GIMP.
  3. Add metadata and store. The metadata editing functionality of GIMP 2.8 isn’t at a level where I need it to be, so I use what I have for my photography: AfterShot Pro. The results are scaled down for web (through a batch profile) and stored in Evernote for referencing on the go.

The series

Without further ado, here are the other posts in this series (updated when new items are added)

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