people keep asking how I colour my artstuffs, and the answer is: impractically. This is probably the most impractical way to do digital art but I keep doin’ it. Here’s how:


First, I take a phone photo of a sketch I wanna work on. This already means that the final result will have pretty low resolution for a work of digital art - nothing to make prints out of or anything. You can size it up and stuff, though! I just can’t be bothered to attempt professionality. but we already knew that.
ANYWAY, first thing I do is to fix up the lightness/contrast in photoshop. (I’ve got CS2 because it’s freeware and I know how it works.) I mean this is kinda really basic but it’s an important step for me? now it looks lineartier than before. CONGRATS

theeen I open
FireAlpaca (another freeware program. it’s like a wonky SAI). I know, I could’ve done the contrast thing in firealpaca, too, but whatever. Okay, so the most important part about my colouring is that I don’t use layers. At all. I paint directly onto the pencil sketch. I use the watercolour brush, and mess around with the size/opacity percent as I go. The thing about the watercolour brush, is that it’s affected by the colours around! So when I paint close to the pencil lines, they smear into it like shadows. Nice.

next I just splat on a lot of colours, usually with opacity settings on low. That means I can just paint over pencil lines - if I don’t press too hard - and they’ll still be visible. That’s how I usually colour faces, anyhow. Just smear it all over with a colour and work out the details later.
You might have noticed I have the Pen Tool selected now. Whereash the watercolour fuses with colours close to it, and its intensity varies with pressure - the pen tool is static. It will draw over things, unless you meddle with the opacity again - as I’m prone to do.

Fixin’ up the lines with the pen tool. And from here I just switch between using the pen and watercolour tools. Usually I do that the whole way, but the order of things don’t really matter much. Just go with the flow.
Sometimes I do a whole drawing in just the watercolour tools. However, if draw something digitally without using a pencil sketch as a base, I use the watercolour tool a lot less.

next step is to just mess around till you’re happy! …or till it’s wayy past midnight and you’re tired and don’t feel like working on it anymore

tada