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Flat Coloring

So you’ve got a cool black on white drawing, and now you want to color it! The thing we’ll aim for in this tutorial is to get your lineart colored in with flat colors. So no shading just yet. We’ll be going through some techniques for preparing the lineart, and we’ll be using the layer docker to put each colour on a separate layer, so we can easily access each colour when we add shading.

Note

This tutorial is adapted from this tutorial by it’s original author.

Understanding Layers

To fill lineart comfortably, it’s best to take advantage of the layerstack. The layer stack is pretty awesome, and it’s one of those features that make digital art super-convenient.

In traditional art, it is not uncommon to first draw the full background before drawing the subject. Or to first draw a line art and then colour it in. Computers have a similar way of working.

In programming, if you tell a computer to draw a red circle, and then afterwards tell it to draw a smaller yellow circle, you will see the small yellow circle overlap the red circle. Switch the commands around, and you will not see the yellow circle at all: it was drawn before the red circle and thus ‘behind’ it.

This is referred to as the “drawing order”. So like the traditional artist, the computer will first draw the images that are behind everything, and layer the subject and foreground on top of it. The layer docker is a way for you to control the drawing order of multiple images, so for example, you can have your lineart drawn later than your colors, meaning that the lines will be drawn over the colors, making it easier to make it neat!

Other things that a layer stack can do are blending the colors of different layers differently with blending modes, using a filter in the layer stack, or using a mask that allows you to make parts transparent.

Tip

Programmers talk about transparency as ‘’Alpha’‘, which is because the ‘a’ symbol is used to present transparency in the algorithms for painting one color on top of another. Usually when you see the word ‘’Alpha’’ in a graphics program, just think of it as affecting the transparency.

Preparing your line-art

Put the new layer underneath the layer containing the lineart(drag and drop or use the up/down arrows for that), and draw on it.

…And notice nothing happening. This is because the white isn’t transparent. You wouldn’t really want it to either, how else would you make convincing highlights? So what we first need to do to colour in our drawing is prepare our lineart. There’s several methods of doing so, each with varying qualities.