Digital Coloring Made Simple

A tutorial about coloring comics. I learned the hard way. You don't have to!

I made a huge mistake when I was coloring Pizza, Pickles, and Apple Pie. I will attribute part of it to my ignorance of how to deliver art for printing, but I do blame the graphic designer for not telling me how he wanted the files delivered (important note: make sure you get the specifications for the artwork before you start the finished artwork).

I’m not going to get into the specifics of all the wrong techniques I used for coloring in the past. Suffice it to say I was doing a lot of it wrong. And I want to share what I’ve learned so you can do it properly to.

Method #1: Use the Paint Bucket

This is by far the simplest way to color, but it has some severe limitations. For example, in Photoshop if you use the Paint Bucket tool, you’ll get a fringe of white between the color and the line art. Procreate seems to do a pretty good of filling everything in, but want if you want to add some shading? Because there’s no separation between the line art and the color, you’re going to have problems not drawing on the line art. Yes, you could select the color and add shading that way, but there’s a better way.

Here’s a video of how method #1 works.

Method #2: Create a duplicate layer

In this method you take your line art layer and duplicate it. Then you do your coloring on the lower layer using the paint bucket tool or coloring by hand. If you want to add shading, that’s fine! You might end up coloring over your line art on the layer below, but you still have a nice line art layer on top. This is a quick method to color for web images, but it won’t work for print. A printer will want the blacks and the colors completely separate, and I was never able to find a good way to remove the black from the bottom layer. At least not with the brushed I use, which have a bit if graininess to them, and aren’t strictly black.

Here’s a demonstration of Method #2.

Method #3: Use the lasso tool

This is the best method to color for print, and it works really well on an iPad as you’ll see and works okay on a laptop or a desktop if you have a tablet.

You’ll create a layer underneath the line art layer. This is your color layer. Staying on this layer, you will use the lasso tool to trace the area you want to be colored and then drag and drop a color to fill it in. This time the paint bucket tool will work fine. You’ll have to fine tune a bit with the pen and eraser to make sure the area is completely covered. Now your color is on a separate layer from the line art. When you send this off to the printer, this is how they’ll want it.

Here’s Method #3.

How I add shading

I was doing this wrong for a long time. What I would do is choose a color, fill in the area, and then choosing a slightly darker color from the color wheel for my shading. It worked, but it’s not very efficient.

All you have to do is create a shade of gray that you can use to shade everything. Then create a layer set to multiply on top of your color layer, and use that gray color for shading. Really easy, and it speeds up the process.

Here’s what I mean:

Any questions? Or better methods? Add a comment!