Get Crisp White Backgrounds on Your Artwork

Ever wonder how artists get those crisp white backgrounds behind their artwork? When you take a picture of your work, the image most certainly doesn't look like that. Today, I'm going to share my process with you, so you can have artwork that looks like this:

1. Take a picture of your artwork near a bright window, or scan it into your computer. I recommend scanning if you want to create art prints of your work later. A bright window is good if you just have a quick sketchbook drawing you want to share.

2. Open your image in Photoshop. If you don't have Photoshop, you can do a 30 day free trial.

3. Open your Adjustments panel, and click on Levels. Move the Level sliders closer to each other. This will darken the dark tones and brighten the lighter tones. You will need to play around with what number to set it at. The key is to not lose the bright tones, but to get the shades of black as close to a true black as possible.

4. Merge all of your layers together. You want your image layer and your levels layer to be one.

5. Use the Paint Bucket tool. Set your tolerance in the toolbar at the top of your screen. I recommend 30 for most artwork, but you will need to play around with what works. Using the paint bucket tool, color the background areas white.

6. Use the Paintbrush Tool. Set the color to white, and remove any specs in the background. This will clean up your image.

7. Use the Clone Stamp tool to remove imperfections in the artwork itself.

8. Resize for Instagram (1080x1080 pixels, 300 dpi). You can do this in Image>Canvas Size....Save as a .psd file and export out as a jpeg.

Hint: If you want to create an Art Print out of your artwork, save a version at 8x10 inches, 300 dpi. I recommend saving all art prints as photoshop pdfs.

Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have more questions about this!