In this Three Minutes Max video, Tony Harmer demos an easy way in Photoshop to create a pencil drawing effect from a photo. By combining blend modes, gaussian blur, and the oil paint effect, he achieves the pencil-drawn look with just one layer and a Photoshop smart object.
Three Minutes Max comes from a fun—yet very competitive—session at our annual CreativePro Week conference. Speakers have three minutes to wow the audience with the tip and win a prize for a lucky conference attendee.
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Transcript
So what I’m going to show you is one of my favorite techniques to wake you up to a few things, doing things on a single layer. I’m going to turn this kitten into a pencil-like piece of artwork, but without adding any additional layers.
So, it’s here as a “Blur smart object.” Inside there you can see one single layer, and I’m going to go up to the Filter menu, I’m going to come down to Blur, and I’m going to choose Gaussian Blur… there, like so. And then I’m going to slide that up a bit — sometimes I go all the way up here and people say, “no, Tony, no! It’s still crazy!” and so I come down a little bit, like that, and just go yeah whatever one of those will do it’s fine.
Then I go for the Camera Raw filter — Shift-Command or Shift-Control-A, like so — so a filter, not the dialog, and I choose one of these profiles. I want a black and white profile ‘cuz I’m going all pencil,
and then I can just hover over these things and look at them. Yeah, that’s really good, that’s going to work quite well.
Now at the moment you’re thinking well that looks pants. Right, well here’s the thing, full disclosure, I forgot to do this bit which is: click on the blending mode sliders just here, and I’m going to change the blending mode of this so that particular filter to Divide, which is sort of like Threshold… but nothing like Threshold whatsoever.
And now I can turn on that thing just there… so this is starting to shape up really really nice. And of course with the Camera Raw filter, if I wanted to, I could come along here and do some tweaks like change the Exposure — make it a bit darker, bit more contrasty — and you’re still thinking, “yeah but that looks crap.”
I’m not finished! So, what I’m going to do next is, I’m going to come up to the Filter menu… I’m going to come down to Stylize, and I’m going to choose Oil Paint from there, because then I can dial in some heavy heavy heavy stylization, like that, if I want to… and all of these other things you can do. Whatever you want with them… it just sliders… pull them around… there no consequence there…
And so now I’ve got a nice kitty like that, and if I want to change any aspect of that, like the Blur for example, I can come in and go… do you know what… maybe a bit more blur might be nice, like that… turn it off to see how that renders.
And there you go! In 2 minutes I’ve turned that into a pencil-like sketch, or a piece of artwork, using just a single layer!
This article was last modified on August 29, 2025
This article was first published on September 25, 2019
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