How to Create an Under Drawing using Photoshop

Alice in Wonderland Graphic Novel Page in Black and White

With every good painting, whether you decided to paint with Photoshop or traditional mediums, you need to start with an excellent under drawing. I created this base drawing using Photoshop and a brush that made my brush strokes look like pencil and paper. I will probably go back and add color into this base drawing, but as you can see this piece can function on its own as a finished piece. 

I think they the trick is to first work very generally by making your brush size huge, say 400-500 width. You use this to roughly block out shadows.

Then you sketch over these shadows, once again very roughly, to get the forms a little more defined. You work roughly at this stage so that you can easily edit the location and size of objects by using the laso tool. 

Then once you have everything in its proper place. You can start perfecting the rough sketch with fine graceful lines on another layer by tracing over the rough sketch. This time adding all the details. 

Next add smooth values to the lines. 

Finally after you have a finished drawing you can set a new layer above your under drawing and set the blending mode to overlay to add color. And another layer above that set to normal, to add fine detail. 

I hope this helps!