Drawing and importing hand drawn images into mobile game

Question

In the article about DragonBox iPhone game, I've read that:

the dragons were all drawn by a fourteen-year-old girl

I would like to do exactly the same: ask someone to draw some images for the purposes of my game, process it in some graphics editing program and then import it into game resources.

My questions are:

1. Can you give me any advices on how the image should be drawn and scanned (again, specifically for the purpose of mobile game)?
2. How should I process the image before importing it to my game resources?

I am going to deploy the game on iOS, as well as Android mobile devices (note: smartphones & tablets, including iPad 3, which has very high resolution: 2048-by-1536-pixel resolution at 264 pixels per inch (ppi)).

Answer 1

A rough suggestion:

1. Drawing the artwork as line art only. Feel free to make some colour mockups with pens, pencils and paper, but colouring on the computer will be far easier and better (depending on the results you're after).

2. Make sure the original art is of a decent size and on bright, white paper. Depending on what you're after, A5 for a single character may be ok. Or just under A4 might be needed.

3. Scan in the line art at 300DPI. In Photoshop, convert to greyscale (or scan as greyscale). Apply levels or curves to get a crisp white and crisp black.

4. Possibly apply some sharpening.

5. Depending on what you need, you could convert the art to vector at this point. To do so, go into channels and command-click the grey channel thumbnail. Then, open the paths panel and click the top right flyout menu and choose Make Work Path.

6. You'll now have a vector path of the artwork that should be reasonably clean. From here you may want to take things into Illustrator for more work, or stay in Photoshop.

There's lots of ways you could do this, but I'd typically do something like the steps above.