Photography used to just create photos. But through post processing (like Photoshop and Illustrator), your photos can become incredible, inky drawings that you might never create by hand. For this week's Shooting Challenge, you'll draw with photos.

The Challenge

Take a photo and convert it to inked/line art. It can be in color or black and white. The goal is, make it look, not like a photo, but as if it were created by hand.

The Technique

In the interest of fairness, I should mention that I've only done this in Illustrator using the powerful and surprisingly classy pen and ink filters. You take a photo and Illustrator converts it to vector-based art (which is one way of creating those Charles Schwab commercials from a few years back). That's honestly the easiest way, as the premade filters can be tweaked within a few moments (and you'll quickly figure out, if you want to create a black and white comic book effect, be sure to really focus on the lighting of your original shot).



But you can also use Photoshop, or similar programs, to trace a figure quasi by hand if you have the skills and the patience. Here's a great tutorial to using that technique, and here are a bunch more, some of which start with photos as source material.

Whatever technique you choose, own it and don't be afraid to experiment. Human figures, especially, translate really well to this post processing technique.

The Example

Our lead "shot" of Scarlett Johansson is by Melissa Evans, who shares her technique in the tutorial we mentioned above. This image is essentially traced from a photo, creating a strange, very cool amalgamation of drawing and photography.

The Rules

1. Submissions need to be your own.
4. Email submissions to, not me.
6. One submission per person.


Send your best photo by Monday, May 7th at 10AM Eastern to with "Inked" in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs, and use a FirstnameLastnameInked.jpg (970px wide) and FirstnameLastnameInkedWallpaper.jpg (2560px wide) naming conventions. Include your shooting summary (camera, lens, ISO, etc) in the body of the email along with a story of the shot in a few sentences. And don't skip this story part because it's often the most enjoyable part for us all beyond the shot itself!
