Traditional and Digital Art Coloring Tips

 Traditional and Digital Art Coloring Tips

This is mostly excerpts from a basics in drawing PDF I created a couple of years ago and updated last September, it's not a full excerpt, though; I added some more information and took some out since I have gained more knowledge in coloring and such since then. 

Traditional Art Tips:

1. If you are drawing on paper, if possible scan or take a reasonably good quality picture (even if it's just a cellphone picture) of your line-art or sketch first ;The reason is, if you mess up your drawing with your coloring process your drawing could be ruined forever, and we don't want that to happen.

2. When coloring with Markers always try to color in uniform (going the same way or pattern), though I as well fail in this area at times this is very important that you use discipline to go the same way, it isn't like pencils that you can somewhat hide that you were everywhere once the area is full of color, markers are tattle tails they will tell on you if you don't color properly.

3. When using markers and pencils together, use colored pencils to make layers of wax to clog up the paper pores; the reason is if you have a lower quality paper like me the makers once you layer enough will bleed through the paper, the pencil fills the pours of the paper thus making it easier to color with less worry, it also adds a nice under texture. If you have a Colorless Blender Pencil (I use Prismacolor) then use that over the pencil layers to blend the colored pencils and also to add an extra later of wax.

Note: Using a Blender Pencil (at least when I use it) makes it almost impossible to add more pencil over it, it's a little easier once you put the marker over it.

Note 2: The pencil will make the surface of the paper smoother and making the marker easier to smudge be careful wile you color that you don't ruin it by smudging.

4. When you color in a sketch book, not matter how good the paper I'd put a piece of printer paper

in between your drawing and the next page, just in case the colors bleed they won't put a mark

on your next page.

5. If you use watercolors to paint but your paper bubbles up way too fast try doing the same technique as was stated in tip #3 and also try and reduce how much water you use when you are wetting your paints.

Computer Art Tips:

My Knowledge is in GIMP but some of these might work in other applications like Sai or Adobe Photoshop.

1. When you color on the computer with any program that has layers, always make your line art on

transparent layers, and make a new layer from visible with no BG of it once you are finished,

then color from underneath. When you color from underneath you don't cover any of the black

lines (or what ever color your outline is) and it looks much cleaner.

2. If you want to color BIG spaces with the paint bucket use the fuzzy select tool and select the

areas that you wish to fill on the layer with the line art, next grow your selection by 1 pixel, then

make another layer underneath and use the paint bucket.

Note: The reason for making it one pixel bigger is to not have the white dots around the color.

3. When coloring a line art that has a white BG in GIMP, use the multiply layer-mode and use the

base color to shade on the new layers using multiply, if you wish to use a darker color use

overlay instead and move the opacity bar over if needed, and for lighting the best layer-mode to

use would be overlay with white.

4. When a picture is totally colored in GIMP get a black in to white gradient and make a new layer over your drawing/picture and make the gradient fade in to the lighting (White being where the light is coming from, black being where it's fading away from) then make the layer-mode overlay and adjust the transparency to how you like it.

Wells that's all for now, I hope this helped you or at least it was an enjoyable read!

May God Bless You, Your Family, Friends, Along With The Health Of Yourself, Family, And All Who Know You. ~ Amen

 ~ Firefly

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