Style tutorial: Pencil sketch

I had a request for a tutorial (okay, after I prompted), so here we go. This is the style we're looking at.





The tutorial deals with icon #3, but we'll skim over the first two as well.

We start with a picture. This is a screencap from Romeo and Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann, capped by Anna at Secret Obsession.



*sigh* So pretty. Okay. I select an area, Juliet and her reflection, crop and resize, to get this:



Now for the pencily part. Duplicate the layer, then go to "Adjust - Negative Image" to negativize (for lack of a better word) the top layer. It should look like this:



Next, go to "Image" and choose "Greyscale," resulting in this:



Now set the layer to Dodge. It'll mostly disappear.



Now's where the fun starts. You can create the pencil effect by doing a gaussian blur, but I like to use the regular blur tool, "Adjust - Blur - Blur." Doing that once creates this image:



Try doing it again: "Adjust - Blur - Blur More." More details come out.



And again!



You can keep this up as long as you want to get the details you want. For this icon, I stopped after 3. Careful, though, because the more you do, the more it'll end up just looking like a b&w photo rather than a drawing.

So. After blurring, I merged the layers to create my base. Then I increase color depth to 16 million. The next step for this was to color the "paper." In playing around with blend modes, I've found that multiply works to color the white space without obscuring the lines. So for this, I wanted the water colored separately, so I selected Juliet's face and filled the area with a yellow-gold color, inverted the selection and chose a blue-green for the water, gaussian-blurred the layer by 7 pixels, then set it to multiply.



That was too bright, not old-looking enough, so I added a layer filled with #6C5516, and set it to color at 40%.



Still too bright for what I wanted. I added a black and white gradient at a 45 degree angle and set it to overlay.



Now it's too dark, plus it's not old enough looking. I used an aged brush by crumblingwalls in a medium gray-brown, erasing it where it obscures the reflection too much, and set it to normal at 60% opacity.



Time for a little more texture. Another aged brush, in a darker cinnamon brown, erasing it from the reflection and set to normal at 14% opacity.



Next the border, and I can't for the life of me remember who made this. Probably saava or dtissagirl. It's a dark brown, set to normal at 30% opacity.



I like this without text, personally. But it needed text for a challenge, so I used Aquiline at 10 pt, fading each line to blend with the background. It reads "It's like the mirror. The thoughts are there, but they create no reflection in you." From BtVS, "Earshot."



For this one, I did things a little differently. I created the base as I described above, but after merging the base layer, I added a dark brown raster layer and set it to color. This made the lines brown rather than gray, and the multiplied gold layer on top added richness to the lines as well as creating the paper color. I used some more aged brushes on it, added some noise and motion-blurred it to get the effect of pencil marks.



I did the same with this, except I added a text brush by crumblingwalls. So so pretty!



Let me know if this tutorial was useful. I'd love to see what you come up with.

ETA: I wrote this at 4 am, and forgot to credit Joseph M. Apice, whose tutorial showed me how to create the base.