This post is part of a series. Here’s the introduction and overview.

Final image

Sketchnoting

It had been a little while since I last created a sketchnote, which is definitely reflected in the quality of the final image. Lessons learned from this image include:

• In areas the note should be less text-heavy;
• My handwriting isn’t the best in the world, so I should slow down when writing;
• Oops… Ran out of material halfway through the second page…
• The title isn’t very interesting, visually.

Post-processing

The post processing involved a lot of trial and error. The final image was a result of these steps:

• Straighten and crop the scan to the actual size of the notebook;
• Use the Posterize tool to reduce the number of colors (after a lot of playing with Curves, Contrast, Threshold and other options);
• Basic clean-up with Heal and Clone;
• Thicken the lines using Despeckle (small values) and adding a small Gaussian blur. I wasn’t content with the line width and the readability after scanning. It didn’t have a lot of “oomph”. This step solved that for me.
• Add single color accents to a new layer, set to Darken only.

The first image was definitely a struggle. The end result will not set the world of sketchnoting on fire, but it sets a nice baseline to judge any future improvements. Both in taking the sketchnotes and post-processing.

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