From Photograph to Line and Color Exploring Colored Pencils Markers and AI

Lately I have been experimenting with something quite different from my usual

photography and digital work: colored pencils, markers, ink, and paper.

The experiments began with a simple question: What would happen if I took some of my original photographs and reduced them to lines, shapes, and areas of color that I could work with by hand?

AI became one of the tools that helped me answer that question.

Rather than asking AI to create finished artwork for me, I used it as part of the design and planning process. I started with original photographs and experimented with ways of reimagining them as simplified line drawings. Trees, branches, landscapes, and other recognizable elements from the photographs could be broken apart into flowing contours, enclosed shapes, repeated patterns, and areas that invited color.

Those revised designs then became the foundations for completely hands-on artwork.

Once they were transferred to paper, the computer was essentially out of the picture. From there, it was pencils, markers, ink—and a lot of decisions.

The Challenge of Orange

One of the reasons I began this particular group of drawings was an art challenge centered around orange. The artwork needed to feature a substantial amount of orange, which gave me an interesting limitation to work within.

At first, "use a lot of orange" sounds fairly straightforward. It isn't.

Orange can move toward yellow and gold, become earthy ochre or burnt orange, drift toward red, or deepen into warm brown. Put those colors beside turquoise or blue and they become incredibly vibrant. Combine them with muted greens and they begin to feel more organic and autumnal.

That turned the exercise into much more than simply filling spaces with an orange pencil.

I began thinking about value, contrast, color relationships, repetition, and movement. Some areas needed to be bright and saturated. Others needed to become quieter so the stronger colors could work. Blues and blue-greens provided cool counterpoints to all that warmth, while reds, yellows, browns, and greens helped connect the different parts of the compositions.

Colored Pencils Are More Interesting Than I Expected

I have accumulated plenty of art supplies over the years, including colored pencils, but working on these pieces has made me look at them differently.

Colored pencils can be surprisingly expressive.

They can produce strong areas of color, but they also allow gradual layering and subtle variations that are difficult to achieve with a marker alone. Pressure changes the appearance of a color. Layering one pencil over another changes it again. A seemingly simple area can contain several different colors before it feels finished.

Markers and ink bring something different to the process. They can establish stronger boundaries, emphasize particular lines, create small accents, or provide areas of more immediate saturated color.

I particularly enjoy the contrast between the precise black lines and the less predictable hand-applied color.

And I don't necessarily want everything to be perfectly uniform.

The slight differences in pressure, the visible pencil strokes, the places where colors overlap and the tiny irregularities are evidence that someone actually sat down with a box of pencils and made the piece.

That matters to me.

AI as a Creative Intermediate Step

Perhaps the most interesting part of this experiment has been discovering another way that AI can fit into an artist's workflow.

There is often a tendency to think about AI art in terms of a finished generated image. My use of it here has been quite different.

My process has looked more like this:

Original photograph → AI-assisted visual experimentation → simplified line design → drawing on paper → colored pencils, markers and ink → finished physical artwork

The photograph provides the original subject and visual information. AI helps me experiment with abstraction and simplification—essentially asking, What else could I do with this image?

But the AI-generated interpretation isn't the destination.

It is a bridge between photography and drawing.

Once I have a design that interests me, I can take it in directions that aren't dictated by either the photograph or the AI version. I decide which colors belong where, which shapes should dominate, where I want contrast, what needs to disappear, and when an area needs another layer of pencil.

In that sense, AI has become another tool for experimentation—alongside Photoshop, a camera, a printer, a pencil, or a sketchbook.

Returning to Making Things by Hand

One of the things I have enjoyed most about this project is simply working on paper again.

There is something wonderfully direct about picking up a pencil and making a mark.

There is no undo button. Colors don't always behave exactly as expected. Sometimes one section works beautifully while another needs another layer—or another idea entirely. And sometimes an unexpected color combination becomes the most interesting part of the drawing.

I also discovered that I enjoy the experimentation as much as the finished artwork.

Each drawing suggests something I might try in the next one: thinner lines, larger shapes, different color combinations, more abstraction, less abstraction, stronger contrast, or an entirely different photograph as the starting point.

And that may be the most valuable thing I have taken from the project.

Photography, artificial intelligence, drawing, colored pencils, markers and ink don't have to exist in separate creative worlds. They can become different stages of the same process.

For these pieces, a photograph became a digital experiment. The digital experiment became a line drawing. And the line drawing eventually became something very physical: paper covered with marks, lines and a whole lot of orange.

And I think I'm just getting started.