I draw a lot of plans for my various creations, and for my LARPs, I needed blueprint. As a graphic designer, it’s not much complicated to do this with Photoshop, and I took the opportunity to make a little action that automates it all!

The original Nautilus drawing

What a blueprint is?

It is in fact a detailed plan, where the background color is blue and drawing white. This type of plan was the norm in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It’s actually a very large cyanotype (photographic process invented in 1842). Here, no matter how to do a real blueprint, the product used is rare, dangerous and expensive. I’ll just scan a sketch I did and open it in photoshop. There, it’s just have to use the Blueprint action I just created, it will replace the bottom of the image, reproducing on a laser or inkjet printer, the blue that was used, and drawing with white.

For those who are less accustomed to using photoshop, and those who would like to know how to install an action, I suggest you to read this tutorial that explains the process from A to Z.

e.g. of blueprint convertion

To lead, you can use a scan of the fantastic Disney’s Nautilus above, which is in high resolution.