Digital manipulation/ Digital experiments 3. Photoshop colouring

The next thing I want to look at using Photoshop is colouring. It is fairly simple but there are a lot of different ways to do it. The one I’m going to look at is probably the easiest.

Once you have an outline (like the drawings in my previous blog) then you can colour underneath it. This is where layers come in very handy. In the image below you can see the layers from one of my line drawings. There is a background layer at the bottom and the line drawing is on its own layer. 

When colouring it’s good to add another blank layer under the line drawing because you won’t colour over the lines. Where it stays normal set it to multiply on the pen layer. this means that the color underneath will show. 

I then get a big brush and just cover the whole drawing in one colour. To get a gradient I use a soft edge brush. I don’t mind if it looks sloppy at this point because I will crop all the unwanted colour off later. After erasing of the excess I then use a hard edge brush to add some fur details to the sabre cat. I also use this to colour the eyes, teeth, heart and add a shadow on the floor. I did all the colouring on one layer but for more complicated drawings its best to use a lot more. Below is a progress of the colour and the final illustration.