Pen drawing, colored with Photoshop

The approach is very basic. There are no vector graphics involved. You just scan the hand drawn sketch and use it as a bitmap, so there’s no tracing needed.

This bitmap resides in a separate layer on top of all other layers and it provides the black outlines for the end result. Below this layer you stack several layers containing the colored areas. I used a separate layer for each color (skin, hair, sweater, pipe, …) and for each tone (skin shadow, skin highlight, …). Since you’re working below your outline layer, the thickness of the lines provide you with a margin of error.

Note #1: Be sure to set the blending mode for the outline layers  to ‘Multiply’. In this way the white area’s will not obscure the colors in the layers below.

Note #2: The outline for this character was drawn by example from the book “How to Create Crazy Cartoon Characters” by Vincent Woodcock. And yes, that is a great surname.