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AKVIS Sketch
By Linda Cameron
Mid-Columbia Macintosh User Group editor
W
hen I was a kid, I used to like to draw all
the time. I wanted to become a cartoon-
ist. I even made some of my own comic
books (sort of fan ction) Batman and Robin stories,
Superman, Supergirl and so on. Back then, I never
imagined having a computer sitting on my desktop
at home. Even less, did I ever imagine that I could
take a digital picture and easily turn it into a sketch
or comic digitally.
AKVIS Sketch can be used as a Photoshop plug-in
(works with Photoshop Elements too) or you can
use the stand-alone version. Just
open any image in AKVIS Sketch
and play with the various control
settings to get the desired aect.
The controls consist of making
it look like a black and white
sketch, a charcoal sketch, a wa-
tercolor painting, colored pencil
with dierent degrees of strokes,
cross hatching, or colorization.
Did you ever see the old Jack
Lemmon movie called How To
Murder Your Wife? He plays a
cartoonist who writes a daily car-
toon strip for the newspaper of
an action hero. In the movie, you
see him dressing up for the part
of his comic hero with a few helpers taking photos
and acting out roles. When he gets back home, he
uses the photos to sketch out the scenes more accu-
rately. I took a couple of years of Commercial Art at
Burnley in Seattle when I was 19-20. That was before
we had personal computers. We were taught to use
tracing paper to accurately draw items from photos,
then use carbon paper to transfer them to the nal
paper or posterboard, which we could then ll in by
hand with inks, pastels or whatever. You probably
thought all that was done by hand!
Most of what I learned then is probably obsolete
now. Why would we need them if we can simply use
our computers? The best thing about that is we can
feel more free to experiment with our artwork on a
computer because if you hate the result, you can go
back and UNDO parts of it or start over. You don’t
waste any expensive art supplies. Everything is on
your screen until you decide to print it or do some-
thing else with it.
I don’t know if it is just because I always enjoyed
drawing, but AKVIS Sketch is one of my favorite soft-
ware applications. I prefer the plug-in
to the stand-alone version because I
have Photoshop and can use layers to
add even more eects. It is great that
you can turn Layers on and o and
use dierent opacities to get specic
eects. To me it is just fun, fun, fun! If
there were any improvements I could
think of for AKVIS Sketch, I wouldn’t
mind if it had some tools that would
allow even more ne tuning of each
image. For example, I wish there were
brushes that would allow me to brush
away percentages of opacity in places
I choose. Or brushes that would blur
parts of the image and some that
would increase the color. I can do all
of that in Photoshop, but it would be
great to be able to do it within AKVIS Sketch.
If I were to start my own comic book again, I would
use AKVIS Sketch on photos I take or have someone
help me to get the scenes. Then I would probably
also use a Wacom Tablet to add a few hand-drawn
strokes over parts of it. You can download a trial
version and try it out any time you want. It costs
from $72 to $89 depending on if you want both the
plug-in and stand-alone version. http://akvis.com/
en/sketch/ System requirements: Intel/G4, 1 Gb RAM,
100 Mb HDD; screen resolution 1024x768 or higher
(28 paginas)
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