Digitally Color your Hand-Drawn Illustrations

1. TRAILER: Hello, I'm Sandra Bowers. I'm an illustrator and surface pattern designer. In this class, you will learn how to color your Honduran illustrations in Adobe Photo-shop software. I will show you two different methods. The magic wand underbrush and give you some tips to make it look better. So join me and add color to your illustrations. 2. Class Project and Supplies: In this class, you will take one of your ink illustrations and color it in using the two method starting the class. This could even be the cover for a coloring book you want to make. To do this, you will need a drawing that has been scanned and you will need Adobe Photoshop software. It can be done with a mouse or a trackpad, but it's so much better if you have a drawing tablet. Remember to post your projects to the project gallery so we can all see them. 3. Set-Up: Open Adobe Photoshop software and go to File, New, and set the size of your art board. I'm going to make this one 12 by 12 inches. Make sure the resolution is set to 300 so you can print it, CMYK and hit Okay. Now we're going to place our line work. Go to File, Place Embedded, select your file and hit Okay, hit Enter. I have already erased the white background from these ones so I have more options to work with it. Here you can see it has no background. If you want to see how I do it and how I clean up my scans, enroll in my class called Isolate the Linework in Your Illustrations. Go to the layer name, right-click and rasterize your layer. If you haven't isolated, you can change its color easily and add different effects. Let's turn on the background again. If you don't want to erase the background or just have your scan drawing, you can do this too. Let's hide this two layers. Go to File, Place Embedded, select your scan drawing and place, and hit Enter. Now set the layer to multiply so the white is transparent. I'll show you. That [inaudible] layer, so it creates a new one on top and click Here. Select the brush tool by pressing B, choose a color, and paint. The linework is there but the background is now transparent because we've set this layer to multiply. But I am going to work with the isolated one so I will erase theses one by dragging it to the trash. Turn on this layer and select the Eraser to erase these green. Now turn on the background. Select the linework layer and lock it so you don't draw on it by mistake. 4. Method 1: The first method uses the magic wand tool, and it can only be used for closed objects. First, let's rename the layers by double-clicking on their name. Select the linework one, grab your magic wand, make sure you have these selected. Tolerance is set to 10, and touch inside the areas you want the color in. We are going to do this by color. First, I'm going to touch the areas of the leaves that I want to be light green. Now go to Select, Modify, Expand, one pixel and hit "Okay". This expands our selected area, so we are sure that we don't have any gaps between the linework and the color. Now touch the color layer, grab the paint bucket tool, and make sure Contiguous is not ticked, and click on any selected area. Go to Select, Deselect or Command D, and now use the brush tool to fill in the corners that were not colored. Make it as small size brush and just paint in the corners. You can make another color layer for each color or you can paint everything in the same layer. Let's go back to the magic wand, touch the linework layer, and select the outer areas of the next color we're using. I am going to select the dark green areas of the leaves. Go to Select, Modify, Expand, and hit "Okay". Touch the color layer, and grab the paint bucket tool. Select your color, hit "Okay", and click on a selected area. Now go to Select, Deselect and use the brush to fill in the corners. You will keep on doing this until you fill in all the closed areas. 5. Method 2: Method two can be used for either closed areas or open areas. It uses the Brush tool. Select your color and use a hard round brush to paint inside the lines, just as if you were a coloring a coloring book. This is easier with a graphic solid, but can be done with a mouse or a trackpad too. If you paint outside the line, just use the eraser tool to erase it. It's super easy to alternate between the eraser and the brush by pressing E for eraser or B for brush. I don't like filling these scene with the paint bucket tool because it leaves a wide edge. If you click on that again, the wide edge disappears, but it makes the edges look jagged, see. We will undo that with Control C, and just use a large brush to fill it in. You can also paint each color on its own layer. That is very useful because you can then modify them individually. At this layer, click here and double-click to rename it. Choose your color, hit Okay and start painting. Since it's on a layer underneath, you can paint these edge really fast. Having the color separated by layers, gives you the ability to modify them individually. For example, go to image, adjustments, hue saturation, and move those slides this way, so you can modify the color of just this flower. I prefer working this way because I can fix the file later if I need to change any colors. Keep doing this until you're done painting, and that's it. Now you know how to fill in your paintings in Adobe Photoshop software. I hope you enjoyed this class. Check out all my other skills share classes, and I'll see you soon. Bye.