This quick class will teach you how to prepare your traditional sketches for digital coloring, so that you can color your traditional work with apps like Photoshop and Procreate without having to re-draw your work or erase the paper background. I will teach this class using Photoshop, but you can use any program you prefer - as long as your drawing program of choice has options for changing layer modes you'll be able to do this in no time!

N.B. This is a class that shows you tips and tricks for how to scan/photo, prepare and edit your sketch and what layer settings to use in your digital coloring program - this particular class is not meant to be an introduction to digital coloring techniques.

What You Will Learn:

Ways to photo/scan your traditional sketches so that it transfers well to digital colors.
Lighting tips and (optional) equipment.
What apps and programs you can use.
Layer settings, editing and tips for getting the results you want without having to re-draw anything.

Additional Tips: Alternatives to Photoshop

If you don’t have Photoshop there are many good alternatives out there! For example, I edited and cleaned my demonstration sketch for this class in Photoshop, but ultimately transferred my layers to Procreate to color the illustration fully. Everything that was done in Photoshop can also be done in Procreate or other apps:

You can import and edit your file directly in your drawing program of choice or use your computers default image-editor as long as it has has adjustments sliders for contrast, exposure and levels or similar sliders. If you don't need to print your work, you can also take a picture of your sketch and edit it on your phone before sending it to you tablet for instance. If you can't edit and color in the same program you can send your edited sketch to your computer/tablet/drawing program using tools like Dropbox, Google Drive, Airdrop, AirDroid or Email.
As an alternative to Adobe Creative Suite there’s the Affinity Suite - Affinity Photo is a good and powerful one-time purchase which is a great replacement for Photoshop.

There’s Procreate for the iPad which is not only great for making art, but it also comes with powerful editing abilities. For Android tablets you have great apps like Artflow or Autodesk Sketchbook which should be able to do similar tasks!

Other drawing programs you can use this technique for can for example be Paint Tool Sai, GIMP, Clip Studio Paint, Krita, Affinity Photo and Medibang Paint - most are available for both Windows and Mac.

Intro Music CC: Sunny by Benjamin Tissot of Bensound

Jei-Sedian Grey

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