Process notes for my layout Santa Maria Maggiore https://ozone.oscraps.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=317942&title=anna-ladder-day-7santa-maria-maggiore&cat=1351

I have returned from vacation and found stuff from the Anna Ladder challenge floating around my hard drive that I hope might help someone. These notes are part of a tutorial we had to send to the Anna Team for the challenge.

My pencil sketch technique tends to be pretty complex.
I use a combination of pencil sketch techniques from multiple sources, including the following (double-asterisked are my favorites):
*Helen Bradley (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7-f7eo5aEc) - Gaussian Blur filter
*DigitalImagingMagazine.com (http://www.digitalimagemagazine.com/blog/featured/tutorial-an-easier-and-better-way-to-create-a-sketch/) - Other>Minimum filter
**Gregory Georges (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/new_page_9.shtml) - Smart Blur filter - if I am in a hurry, this is my go-to technique, but the result of his process has to be smoothed out. I usually select the jaggy result of his process, "refine (selection) edges" in Photoshop, fill the smoothed selection with black on a new layer and then discard the original jaggy layer.
**Glowing Edges filter - very common, you can find tutorials all over the internet (e.g. http://www.graphics.com/article-old/creating-charcoal-drawing-effect-photoshop)
**Ch-Ch-Check It (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVUua9CzUiM) - Motion Blur filter
*Russell Brown's Watercolor Assistant (reverse-engineered here: https://ozone.oscraps.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=310055&title=reverse-engineer-russel-brown-27s-watercolor-assistant)