Moose Skull Sktech Colored in PhotoShop

My latest exercise was to take a sketch of a moose skull that I drew a couple weeks ago and scan the line art, then color and shade in PhotoShop. I had the sketch in my sketch pad, drawn and shaded in pencil, then outlined in ink. Based on my last couple of efforts, I had realized that it would be best to scan just the line art, with no shading, in order to have more flexibility once the sketch was digitized.

To start, I carefully erased all the pencil lines and shading before scanning in grayscale at 600 dpi (really ppi), since the drawing was a bit small (about 2 inches high) and I wanted it to be as large as possible. 600dpi is the highest native resolution my scanner supports.

Next, I opened the file in PhotoShop and used the Threshold adjustment to eliminate almost all the background, and make the line art nice and black. After that, I had a bit of initial clean up to do with the eraser tool, and then I zoomed in on the inked lines and cleaned them up a bit using a combination of the paint brush in airbrush mode, and a layer mask. The overall line work in the sketch isn't very good - a bit shaky and not nearly as smooth on the curves as I'd like. I may re-visit it someday and cleanup the lines even more.

Once I was satisfied with the line art, I started creating layers for the coloring as follows:

Eye and nose fill layer

Head fill layer

Antlers fill layer

Shadows layer mask

Highlights layer

I colored the eyes and nose black, then colored the head and antlers. After that I used a layer mask for the shadowing, and played with gradient fills to get some basic shadowing in place, attempting to simulate a light source coming from the upper left of the image. It's not perfect by any means, and is also something I may re-visit at a later date.

The last thing I did was some white highlights in the eyes and nose, to give the illusion of eye and nose sockets. I was going to work on some more highlights for the head and antlers, using a layer mask, but decided to leave the drawing as-is for the meantime.