Transcripts
1. Introduction: Do you find traditional coloring a little intimidating or daunting? Maybe you stress over picking out the perfect coloring palette. Or maybe you worry about putting hours into a coloring page only to mess it up with the slip of a hand. Well, stress no more. I have something super fun that we're going to learn how to do today. And that's coloring. Digitally. Coloring digitally allows us to swap out colors and redo areas as many times as our heart desires. No more mourning over ruined coloring pages. It's also a way to preview what your coloring page could look like by trying out your colors. On this digital version before putting it down onto paper. I'm going to show you one of the many ways to color digitally inside Procreate. Hey guys, my name is Melanie bus. I am the multi fashion artist behind the swimming owl. You can find me on Instagram at the swimming out. You can check out my website, assuming l.com. And you can find me all over the internet selling on several print-on-demand sites like Society 6, Creative Market. I have a shop on Etsy and several others. You can get to all of them though through my website. I'm so excited that you're joining me today. For coloring digitally. I make a lot of coloring pages. And I am going to be giving you some free these today so that we can color one together. I have a lot of fun techniques to show you. Of course, there are many ways to do this, but I'm going to show you one of my favorite ways to color inside the Procreate app on our iPads. So get your iPads out and let's increase the color, can decrease the stress. I can't wait to see you in the next video.
2. Supplies + Downloads: Hey guys, welcome back. Let's talk supplies and downloading your freebies. I am using an iPad Pro, the latest version of Procreate. I'll be using an Apple Pencil, but you could also use your finger. I'll be using all free brushes inside Procreate, so don't worry about downloading or finding other brushes. I've got a couple of color palettes for us to use, but you can find your own, which I will talk more about leader. And we need a PNG or JPEG of our coloring page, which again, I'll be providing you with a handful of in the projects and resources tab or feel free to color one of your own. As far as your iPad, you do not have to have an iPad Pro. As long as you can run the latest version of Procreate on your iPad and still be able to have plenty of layers on an 8.5 by 11 Canvas, you will be good to go. So in the next video we're gonna talk about how to set up our canvas and import our file to get coloring. See you there.
3. Your Project: Okay, so your project for this class is going to be to bring a coloring page to life, increase the color, decrease your stress and have fun with this technique of coloring on the iPad. You can either color one of the coloring pages I've provided you with in the projects and resources tab. Or feel free to color whatever coloring page you might have on hand that you have the downloaded digital copy of. Again, you need a PNG or JPEG, preferably a PNG. You'll then export it as a JPEG to save onto your iPad or Dropbox or wherever you keep your files in that I'd love to see you share it in the projects below. You're also welcome to share your colored version of your pages on social media. I want to see all of your hard work.
4. Canvas Settings + Importing PNG: Okay, first things first, let's talk about setting up our canvas. Inside the Procreate app. Go ahead and locate this plus icon here in the top corner. Tap it. And if you don't already have some kind of 8.5 by 11 Canvas that you'd like to use. We're going to learn how to set one up. Hit this little icon with the plus inside. And let's go two inches. Let's change the width to 8.5 and the height loops. Try that again and the height to 11. I want my DPI 300 just in case I decide I want to print this out later. This says I have 75 maximum layers, but again, I'm on an iPad Pro. Your number might be a little bit smaller if you're on a different iPad and that's okay. For color profile, I'm going to choose one under the RGB mode. Yours may automatically go to Display P3. And I would recommend you changing it to this sRGB preference mode because you might be a little bit disappointed if you went to print your coloring page out and you were in Display P3 mode, your colors are going to look quite a bit different from your iPad to the printed version. So I'll stick with this RGB mode. And I think that's all we need to do other than renaming our canvas. So I'm just going to call this coloring page. And since I already have one saved, I just need to add a little too. And I'm gonna go ahead and hit Create. We are now ready to import our file. If you are going to be importing a PNG, go ahead and keep watching this video. If you're going to import a JPEG, go ahead and skip to the next one where I'm going to show you how to set up a JPEG correctly. They are different. So for a PNG, come over here to the wrench, go to Add, Insert a File. Go ahead and locate wherever your PNG coloring page file is. I'm already opened to my PNG folder. And I'm going to select this mermaid diving down to grab a seashell. So if you'd like to work along with me today on the same coloring page, choose that one. Okay. So my coloring page went ahead and fit to screen here. If it did not do that for you. Go ahead and tap this arrow here. Go to uniform. Go to snapping and make sure snapping is turned on. That's going to help us Center or coloring page. So if I tap that again and if I move this around, you'll see this yellow cross-hair pop-up when it's actually centered. It'll show us one vertical and one horizontal. So this is centered. We are good to roll. So I'm going to tap off of that by going to my Layers. This next part is really important. Come over here to this layer here, tap the photo. Once this pops up, choose reference, we need to set this PNG as a reference layer in order to be able to drop colors in and retain our black lines on top. From here on out. All of our other layers are going to go underneath the reference layer as we begin coloring. In the next video, we're going to talk about color palettes, but don't stress. I've got lots of options for you and we can always change our minds later.
5. Canvas Settings + Working On A JPEG: All right, Let's talk about jpegs really quick. You've already got your 8.5 by 11 canvas setup. What we're gonna do now is add our JPEG file and get it properly set up so that we can actually color underneath that JPEG. So come over here to the wrench, hit Add and insert a file. I'm gonna go locate my JPEG version of my mermaid. I'm gonna go to my JPEG folder here, and I'm going to be coloring on this Mermaid That's diving down to grab a seashell today. So if you want to follow along with me exactly, pick that coloring page and import it. Okay. It pulled it open for me. So now if it did not resize properly to fit the canvas, I'm going to make sure I'm on the arrow. I'm on uniform, and I wanna make sure snapping is turned on. That will allow me to center the canvas. It will show me the little guides. A crosshair will pop up when it is perfectly centered. So right there. And tap off of that. These next steps are the most important to be able to color on a JPEG. So what we wanna do is tap the coloring page layer and make it a reference. So once you've turned that into a reference, now come over here to where there is a little N that stands for normal blending mode. And we want to change this to multiply. So you can kind of slide through these different options. It'll start on normal. We want to come up to multiply. That's going to allow us to color inside our lines, so to speak, and to make that white background go away. That's the hardest part about coloring on a JPEG digitally is that that white background is there, whereas a PNG is transparent. So from now on when we're coloring, we're going to make a new layer and drag it beneath the reference layer. And now we should be able to have everything is set up properly. We should be able to drag and drop, Yup, into these different sections. So it looks like we are good to go. In the next video, we're going to talk about color palettes and how to get something picked out. Even if it stresses you out.
6. Setting Your Color Palette: Okay, let's spend just a couple of minutes talking about color palettes. I won't spend too long on it since like I said, one of the joys of digital coloring is being able to change our mind over and over and over again by recoloring layers. But I will show you a few options just to get you started, to at least get something loaded up to drag and drop colors from. So you can either import the color palettes that I have given you in the projects and resources tab, you'll just tap those, they'll download to your iPad. And then you should just be able to tap the file and it will automatically import into procreate for you. If you like those pallets, I will be using one of the ones that I'm sharing with you today. Another fun choice is to go to Pinterest or Unsplash and look for a photo that you just really love. The colors are vibe of. And then you're going to pull it in and make a palette based off of that photo. So I'll show you how to do that. So tap on the little circle of color here. Hit the Plus. Go to New from photos and it will pull up your gallery. So I'm gonna go with one here that I liked. That's got some coral colors, some blues and greens. And automatically at the top here, it's going to make a new palette for me based off of an image I pulled off of Pinterest. So that's a super fun way to get a palette made for you without you really having to make many choices. Another really cool option is to use this website called cooler, I believe is how you pronounce it, dat CEO. And I'm going to show you now how to use that website and get your own coloring palette. So go to C-O-L-O-R dot c 0. This will be the home screen. You can do this from your iPad or you could do it from a desktop computer. What we're gonna do is tap on Generate. That's going to open up a new page here. It's going to have a start with five colors. I'm going to go ahead and add some more in here until it won't let me add anymore because we want a nice large coloring palette here. So that's as many as it's going to let me use. Okay. I'm gonna keep one of these colors over here to be like a light skin tone by pressing this lock icon. Now it's going to keep this color. And I'm going to keep one of these kind of dusty green colors, a nice seaweed color. This could be an icy shell. And then I'm going to hit this Generate button with the button here. If you're on a desktop, you'll just press your space bar. And what it's gonna do is gonna give us alternate colors that will go well with these three that I lacked in place. Wow, so that's kind of a wild one. I'm gonna see what happens when I tap it again. Now it feels a little too how Lean for me. Now it's pretty dark. That is, let's see if there's anything in here that I like. I kinda like this color here. And maybe this one on the end. Let's hit Generate again. That one looks really good. So that's a pretty good start here. So what I'm going to do there are ways to export this. I have a little trouble doing that with my iPad sometimes, so I actually like to just take a screenshot and then I will pull that into Procreate by, I will hit make a new palette and create from an image. And I'll have this saved in my gallery as a screenshot. So that's how I like to use this website to make a color palette for me when I'm having a hard time choosing or don't even know where to get started. This is really cool. And with a tap of a button or the hit your space-bar, you get endless options with a couple of favorite colors you might have picked up. So I hope that was helpful to you. Go ahead and get your color palette setup, and let's get going in the next video, Let's start coloring.
7. Coloring Part 1 - Setting Up Layers + Using Drop Fill: All right, Let's finally get to the fun part, coloring. It just seems like you guys have been going on and on about housekeeping and setting up the Canvas and coloring palettes. And just kidding, That was me. Let's get to the real stuff now. Okay, in case I didn't mention it before, I am using the muted mermaid palette. So I'm gonna set that as my default. And I like to use the disk version when I'm coloring, I just, I love the visual of this, but you can definitely use the classic mode if you'd prefer. I'm gonna go ahead and clear this out. That's just my history of colors used before birth. Let's go to our layers. Let's double-check that we're on a reference. I had to reset mine. And now each time we color a new section, we need to make sure we're working on a new layer. So for each different thing here, so her hair should be on its own layer, the skin should be on its own layer. The seaweed adds own layer. You get the idea. So I'm gonna make a new layer and I'm going to drag that below my reference. So hold on it and pull it down. Okay, So I'm on a new layer and I'm going to start with her skin tone. So I'm gonna come over here into keep myself organized. I'm going to rename this layer and tap it, hit Rename and name it something profound like skin. That way I can keep track. And I'm gonna come over here to my color palette and pick something I'm going to go with, I'm going to start with a lighter color because I'm going to build more color up with some shading and highlights later. So just to show you how this works, we're going to drag and drop. And my color threshold looks good, but in case yours doesn't incase, you do that, and suddenly your whole screen turns out color. I'll show you what, why that's happening. So say that happened. That means your color threshold is too high and we need to next time, not lift our pencil right away. So I'm gonna show you how to fix that. So everything filled. So I'm still holding on my screen. I never lifted my pencil and I'm going to drag backwards until it looks correct like that. Same thing if you're using your finger. So now I'm going to drag again, good. Now I'm going to tap this thing that pops up loops and went away. It says continue filling with recolor, tap that a little cross hair is going to pop up and we actually don't want all of that background, that color. So I'm going to drag that to a section. I do want to recolor like her hand. Now that I have it in a good spot now I can just tap the next sections. And that little cross here, we'll move to any spot that I tell it to recolor, select her stomach and don't forget her face. And that should be all of the skin tone for now. So I need to tap off of this to get the recolor tool to go away. So I'm just going to tap my layers. Okay, so the next thing I want to do, make a new layer. Let's do the seashell. So I'm going to rename it. Bet you can guess what I'll rename it. Seashell. You're right. As long as it's beneath my coloring page layer, we're good to go. So let's choose, Let's choose this light pink here or choose any color that you like. And I'm going to repeat this drag and drop process. Color threshold looks good. Let's choose the Recolor button and I got lucky and it popped into the right spot there. But again, if this happened, don't panic. Just drag it to a section you do want to recolor. Now we can tap, tap, tap to fill in the rest. Whoops. And I don't know if you can see what just happened. I accidentally tapped my black line work and I don't wanna do that. I want to keep my lines crisp, clear and dark. So I'm going to hit with two fingers undo. And I'm going to tell it to come inside this little spot here, not on the line. So that whole seashell is now colored in. Perfect. Let's do her hair because that'll be a lot of fun. So I'm going to rename it again. Here. I am going to do, I'm going to start with this purple and I might actually make it a little more saturated, just so that it shows up really well for you guys. Ok, threshold looks good. Now I'm the little recolor went away because I waited too long. So I'm just going to drag it loops. I'm going to drag and drop one more time. Now I can tap that again. And it happened to go on in a hair section, so good. I believe that automatically just goes to the middle of your screen wherever it is. And so that's why sometimes you're going to have to drag it into the proper sections. So I missed one little spot here and I think that's it. Now we can try and tap into this open. It worked good. Sometimes you'll find these teeny tiny little sections that don't want to recolor very easily. 0. And it looks like at some point I did my black line work well. So we'll just fix that. But sometimes these teeny tiny sections won't want to be recolored easily. So I'll show you later how we fix those by coloring in by hand. All right, so we're going to continue this process. And we're going to fill in all of these different sections, making them all on their own layers. So that way we can come in and turn on Alpha, lock these layers and put in our shadows in our highlights. All right, Let's talk troubleshooting for justice. Second, if on one of your coloring pages you run into a problem where the lines aren't perfectly closed. The black line work and you go to Fill color, and it just keeps filling the Canvas because the line has not been closed. You can easily fix that and I'm going to show you how. So let's just say so here's actually a good example. Hopefully you can see this is not perfectly close. There's actually a couple of open pixels right there. And that could create a problem for us. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go and find an inking brush. Come to your brushes, go to ending and find the studio pen. Next, choose black, double-tap at the bottom of your color wheel here, and it will choose that darkest black there. I'm going to double-check that I'm on the right layer, I'm on my coloring page. So look too big of a brush. Let's adjust that size. And I'm just going to complete that line. So now when I go to color drop some green into this piece of seaweed, it should actually stay within that boundary and that overflow. So if you run into a problem like that, That's how you quickly fix a coloring page so you can still use your color fill.
8. Coloring Part 2 - Filling in Remaining Layers + Troubleshooting: Go ahead and continue filling in the rest of my coloring page. I'm probably going to go ahead and speed this up. You can kind of watch me color through here. And as I come to things that I might want to mention to you, I'll let you know, but I'm gonna go ahead and get started on some seaweed now. I'm gonna make a new layer, rename it, and start filling this in. If you feel like your color palette is too limited and you're not finding the colors you need. You can only start with something and adjust it from there. So a lot of times for seaweed, I like to use a lot of different variations of green. But again, remember we can always recolor this later, so don't worry about it being perfect the first time. Sometimes I also like to do two different colors for seaweed. To give it a like a light side and dark side and to make a lighter color, I'll usually shift towards yellow a little bit. I'm gonna go ahead and keep all of this seaweed on the same layer. Because when I go to recolor this later with highlights and shadows, these are not going to bother one another. They are far enough away from each other. I can still color them without running into the other. So I'm going to go ahead and do the water first before I do her tail the water, I'll probably end up changing the color of multiple times throughout this. But just to give me an idea for now, so that way I can pick some fun colors for her tale. I think this is going to help me pick colors for her tail anyway. If at any point you've finished a layer and you've forgotten a section, we can always come back to it and fill in little areas. So like say you were filling in the water and you realize you forgot this area afterwards and you would already moved on. We can still come back to that layer and fill that section in. So don't panic about that later if you find you've done that. Okay, So I'm feeling like that watercolor is not really something that I love. And that's okay. We're going to change that later. I'm in a go ahead and finish filling in her tail, her seashell bra, seashells here. And then we can get to the really, really fun part of the highlights and shadows. So if you're one of those people that still really enjoys that feel of coloring sections in by hand. Don't worry, this is not going to be just a drop and fill process. We have lots of coloring by hand to do to really finish off as coloring pages. It is not going to stay flat and boring like this. Now, since her tail is far enough away from her bra, I could put this on the same layer, especially if I'm gonna be using the same colors. And if you are using an iPad that's not giving you as many layers, that's an option for you. Anything that is far enough away from another item, you can put them on the same layer if they're going to be similar colors, and if we go to change the color later, it won't affect it too much. Go ahead and throw those two things on the same layer. So I am going to go ahead and put her bra on the same layer just to show you that, that is totally fine. Some of these sections may get a little small. Let's see if it'll do this. It did. Okay, good. So for the next layer, I'll go ahead and try her jewelry in the seashell on its own layer and then finally the bubbles. And here is a good example where I forgot to fill in some skin tone. So what I'm gonna do is go find my skin layer. Luckily I rename these so it's easy to find, right? So now I'm going to drop this in here and fill in these little sections that I missed. Whoops, not that section. All right. This may have to okay. Got it. Perfect. So that's how we fix that problem. Now I can come back to my jewelry layer and fill that in and I'm gonna go ahead and make some kind of gold color. I'll make that gold and I'm going to make the pearl, or make that a pearl. I'm just going to put a gray in there for now until I can come back in with some shadows and highlights. And I have another layer here that I didn't actually do anything on. So I'm going to make that her seashell in her here. Let's see. Let's make it some shade of pink to kinda go with that other seashell and will probably change our mind about this later. We'll need to do our lifts and the bubbles here and choose a skin tone color and then come this direction With can change it like that. Anybody else panic when that happens, when you go to hit the recolor tool and it builds on their own section. Even though you know, you can fix it. Are right. Oh, and I need to do her eyebrow on the hair layer. So let's come back down to the hair. Choose that purple. Okay, so we just have the bubbles left and I am going to put some color in those bubbles, a very light blue, and make them look really cool again with our shadows and highlights. So come up here and make the bubbles. Another really fun thing is if we're recoloring traditionally, we're going to zoom way in. Could we we'd have to squint and try and make up those little sections. So I kinda like that about and coloring digitally is being able to zoom in when my old eyes are failing. Okay, so I think that's all the bubbles. But if I missed one, I can always come back and fill it in later. So now that we have a good base here of color, we are going to talk about adding in highlights and shadows.
9. Adding Highlights + Shadows Part 1 (Skin + Seashell): All right, so now's the time to really settle in, because this is where we're going to be spending the majority of our time. And in my opinion, when we're going to have the most fun, this is where we start to make things look really interesting because flat color like this is no fun. If we recoloring traditionally with colored pencils, we would be layering our colors until we finally got the results of having some dark areas and light areas and making pop off of the page. We wouldn't just put down a layer of color and let it be. So let's make this coloring page way more interesting by adding in a light and the dark areas. First, we need to decide where our light is coming from and just make a mental note for this coloring page, I'm imagining the light is coming from above and so all of my shadowed areas will be underneath, like her hair here at the bottom of the seaweed underneath this coral. Okay. So my light parts will be up on top of her, like on the top of her hair, the top of the seashell, these seaweed will be much later than the seaweed. So that's what I'm gonna do for my lighting. So go ahead and take a minute to analyze your coloring page and decide what direction your light's coming from. Okay, next, we need to pick a section to start shading. I'm going to start with her skin tone. So let's zoom in here and I'm going to go and find the layer that her skin is on. Luckily, we were really clever and we renamed all our layers. So I can easily find that. And what's really important here is to turn on Alpha lock. There are two ways to do this. You can either use two fingers and swipe this direction until you see the little checker boxes. If you're having trouble getting that to work, which sometimes I do. You can also tap the layer and tap Alpha Lock. Look for those checker boxes. If those are there, you are good to roll. The reason we want to use Alpha Lock is that it's going to allow us to color on top of this layer and only this layer, only this section that we've colored in. So even if I'm coloring like crazy all over the place, it's only going to apply that color inside her skin. All right. I'm going to show you what it looks like if I did not turn Alpha lock on. So I went ahead and moved her skin layer to the top to help you see what I'm talking about. I don't have alpha lock on, so now it's allowing me to color all over the place, which is not what we want. We really want our shadows and highlights to stay inside of the skin tone boundary there. So let's turn Alpha lock on and see what happens if I scribble around like that. That's much better. That's coloring where I want it to. If we're recoloring traditionally, we'd have to be a lot more careful, right? So this is kinda lowering the stress level here. Next, let's talk about the different brushes we can use to put our highlights and shadows in. So all the brushes that I'm recommending are already built into the latest version of Procreate, procreate buybacks. The ones that I like are some that imitate traditional materials. But you might like something completely different in so this is where a invite you to experiment with different brushes and see what textures you can get with all of the different options that are already built into Procreate here, I tend to really like the sketching section because I like using the 6 B pencil as if it were a coloring pencil because all you have to do is pick which color out of your box here you want to use. And you have every color imaginable in a pencil. And it has a really cool texture to it. I also really love the soft pastel, the oil pastel, and the artist crayon that are also under the sketching section. The textures that these provide are really fun and make me think about coloring as a kid again. Another option for a lot of texture. Are any of these charcoal brushes. These provide a really nice consistent texture across and I tend to really like the carbon stick. But again, play around. So to get started, I am going to start with the 6 B pencil. Just because like I said, I like to pretend that I'm actually using a colored pencil when I use the 6 B pencil. So I'm starting with her skin tone. It's on alpha lock. I'm going to start with some shadows. So in order to do that, I'm going to choose her skin color here, and I'm going to go darker and more saturated. And again, if you don't like this disk view, you can always do it in the classic mode where you can slide towards more saturation and slide closer to these dark levels here. So let's start with that. And I'm gonna go ahead and start laying this color in where I know there will be a shadow. So if my light's coming from above, I know there should be a shadow on her stomach here where her hair is covering a lot of that. The light would hit. So let's just see how our brush size and opacity looks. So I'm going to adjust that. That was a little too harsh for me. My lower the opacity and then make the brush just a little bigger. And I like to hold my pencil on the side like this so that I get a less concentrated version. And a softer effect. Just like if I were using a colored pencil and I'm just gonna keep building layer after layer to build that color up. So those of you that love coloring traditionally still, you can see how this is pretty similar. Okay, So I laid some of that down. Let's come in here. There should be some shadow here underneath her arm and where the hair is laying over her arm. If you're putting this in and panicking, thinking it's way too much texture, we can fix that too. So just relax and keep shading. Under here is going to have some dark areas where her hair's falling over her face and it should be a little bit under her. And I'm going to smooth this out. So again, no panicking. This arm would create a little shadow in here and I won't let I won't keep you guys for all of this shading because I could go on for hours doing this. This is the most fun. This is the most fun part about coloring digitally is adding in all this shading, at least in my opinion, is going to get a base built up here. These underneath parts of her arms should be pretty shadowed. They're not really going to be beginning a whole lot of light on them unless it's bouncing up off of the ocean floor here, which it could be. Plus this is a fantasy scene. So we really write the rules here. All right, I'm going to choose a highlight color, so I'm going to go lighter, go more towards the yellows. And let's see how this looks. Can't really see it need to go a little brighter. That's looking better. And again, we're going to blend this and I know it's looking really start great now. Okay, so thanks to a little technical difficulty, I got cut off with my video and I went to explain how to use the smudge tool. So I'm gonna kinda recreate that right now with a screen recording. I'm going to lay in some dark pencil marks right now with my six B pencil so that we can really see it. Then I'm going to go and hold down on my smudge tool so that it will choose my current CICS be brushed smudge with. And then I like to kinda very up how I do this between doing little circles and back and forth to blend my colors together. You can see how that looks a lot smoother now. So it's just like if you are blending with traditional coloring, whether you are using your finger or a cotton swab with some baby oil were imitating that idea or a blending stick. I'm going to put some lighter color back in because I overdid it a little bit. And then I'll come back with the smudge tool, smooth it out, and just keep building up that layer of color to get the level of highlight and shadow that I want. So just keep using this effect on each section of your coloring page and that's how you use the smudge tool. All right, So backing out looking at this, I am liking this so far. I think it needs a little more contrast. So what I'll probably do is come back here to my dark color again, make it even a little darker, more saturated, lay in another layer of color and blended again. But I'm not gonna make you guys continue to watch this at the regular speed for the entire thing. I'll go to the seashell next in just a moment to show you another section and how we can play with more color. So go ahead and to your heart's content, continue shading and highlighting. If you are working in the skin tone, keep going until you're really happy with it. Switch back and forth between coloring and smudging to get the look you like, play around with a couple of different brushes, experiment and find your coloring style. Right? So I kinda finished up her skin tone here. I could probably fuss with this all clap more because I just find this part so much fun. But I'm going to call this good for now. I just came in and I added some more shadows and smooth things out, more shadow, smooth things out and just repeat that process until I got to a point where I was pretty happy with it. When I zoom out, I can see some contrast there which is looking pretty good. And I can always come back later and fiddle with it some more. But I'm gonna go ahead and move on to another layer so that way you guys can watch me do the seashell. So let's find that pink seashell down here at the bottom. I'm going to go ahead and pick a shadow color. So if, again, my color wasn't in my palette, which it is, I can always find it like this again, hold down selected. Let's go with something a little more saturated and darker. And then it's going to bump it this way a bit towards that more red. And I still, I'm using my six B pencil, but feel free to use anything you'd like. I didn't mention it earlier, but some of you like to color with alcohol markers and what not. You can find a marker in here. I'm not sure if it's under drawing or inking. There's one under inking, you can definitely color with those two. Men. Go back to my 6 B pencil and start putting some shadows in here. And what we're gonna do really fun with this seashell is we're going to use some other colors to give it an iridescent effect. The xat is something that when we're using colored pencils, by layering multiple colors, we just really create a lot of interest. So inside this shell is going to be nice and dark. And then out here we'll have some highlight. Her finger though would put a shadow here. And then let's put some shading around each of these sorta roles. That might have been a little too much. I'm kind of assuming if you're watching this class, you probably already know a lot of the gestures, like the undo. If you don't do just a quick little, a quick little bit on that. To undo something we don't like two fingers tap on the screen, undo three fingers to redo. You can also do the same thing over here with this little arrow, undo or redo. Okay, quick little tip there. And then finish coloring in these lines here a little bit. Okay, let's pick a little bit. Actually, let's put a little bit along the edge here. Since that part is definitely not facing our light source. And now let's pick a highlight. Let's come even more this direction. By changing up that color a little bit. And it's going to help us build more interest. And let's go even lighter. Really make it shiny. That brighter, white towards white Hugo, the shinier, it's going to start to look. And then we can even put in some like bright white spots. Especially on this top area where we know is going to be getting the most sunlight from above. She might be blocking some of it, but we're making this up a little bit since it is a fantasy scene and I want my seashell shiny. Wow, try saying that several times. Okay. Now the other thing I wanna do is I want to put either some purple or some blue in here. To give this more of a seashell quality. Make it look like it's kinda some iridescent spots here. We will look how magical that starting to look. And again, don't forget to change your opacity if you want to be able to build the layers. And instead of putting down to Sir, really concentrated area of color is lower that opacity and just build it up by either pressing harder or going over the same area several times. I'm really liking how this is looking. I do want to smooth it out just a little bit. And it looks like I forgot to turn on Alpha Lock you guys. But lucky for me, this has beneath my water layer, go ahead and turn it on now. And we can still fix that. Teachers make mistakes too. Okay, Let's smooth this out a little bit. I'm just gonna kinda go over the whole thing roughly. And then I'm gonna come in here a little tighter and smooth this part out even more since that inside of a seashell, usually it's a very smooth and shiny. Now that this needs to look realistic, but I want to emulate it just a little. Let's go a little darker. More contrast we put in here, the more this is going to pop off the page. And this is an important part of this coloring page because that's what the mermaid is going towards. So I want to spend some time on it and make sure it looks really good. I like this area down here should be really pretty dark. Just like that. Thumb should be a little darker. You'll see I'm really rotating my canvas a lot to help me get into these spots a little more naturally so that my hand doesn't feel awkward. I think we do that a lot when we're writing and coloring anyway, it's even easier on the iPad. I don't have to actually move everything. I just twist and turn with my fingers. Let's go even a bit darker here. Alright, let's blend this in a bit. That's looking really good. What do you guys think? You don't? Just keep building that until you're happy. And I think the last thing I'm gonna do is maybe just put in a bit of some blue, a little bit more. See colored. Just a little bit here. Even at that little something extra. It's kinda really pop off of the start pink. So I think that's looking really, really good. Again, when I zoomed out, it didn't look quite as dramatic as when I was zoomed in like this. So that may mean we need to do a little adjusting later, but you guys get the idea of what we're doing here. Just like with the skin tone, keep working until you're happy with it. And if you feel like you're messing up, just undo, undo, undo. Unlike with colored pencils, where we'd get kinda stuck with her choice there. Here we can keep redoing it until we're happy with it. You could, even if you were really, really unhappy with the color from the very start, you could just delete that layer and refilled of seashell. And again, start from scratch and get something that you are happy with. But I think that's pretty good. I'm going to show you guys really quick. Since I forgot to turn Alpha lock on, it's not really affecting me right now. If it did affect you later, one thing you can do is since it's hiding behind the water layer, the part that I did color over my lines. I'm going to hide the water layer over here. I'm going to hit the check to hide the water and we can see I colored outside the lines. So I'm going to select my eraser. And I'm probably going to select something that's a little more solid. And then go into inking and choose the studio pen to use as an eraser. Make sure I'm on the seashell layer yet. I'm going to turn this up or turn the opacity all the way up. That was too big. And I'll just kind of erase this out just in case this was going to affect me at any other point and my coloring, I can get rid of it.
10. Highlights + Shadows Part 2 (Rocks + Coral): All right, Let's color in another section together. I'm gonna go ahead and start on these racks. And I'm going to show you another type of brush. Instead of using my six B pencil, I'm going to go ahead and use that artists crayon. It's a lot more texture. It's going to give me more of a rocky. We'll look. I'm going to go and find my racks. Here they are. I'm going to pick something really nice and dark. And come in here. I'm going to actually put home, let's turn on Alpha lock. So important. Let's go ahead and put down a base layer of texture here. Let's turn up the opacity. There we go. I'm just gonna kinda put that in. Might've been a little too much too heavy handed. That is going to be darker down here. Okay. Now let's make this smaller and starts spot adjusting. Let's make this darker along This underneath area. And same with this one. Nice and dark at the bottom. And you can always bring back some of these spots and just a little bit. And I could have even put these on their own layer if I wanted to be really controlled with those, but I don't mind it. I don't mind this texture bleeding over into those areas because I can always come back with a finer detail brush and put those spots back in. A little bit more up here. All right, let's pick a lighter color just to start working on those other areas a bit. Kinda put this into these little nooks and crannies. And maybe just a light wash of it up here. That's a pretty good look and wacky. Put some concentrated spots. Again, more contrast, It's going to look more interesting. Let's come over to this rod can do the same idea. My light is coming from above, so it's going to be hitting this part of the rock the most, right. So that's looking pretty good for now. And I could keep coming in and refining that and I can smudge it around a little bit if I felt it was too textured. But for Iraq, I don't think we're going to have too much texture. Unless we want it to be perfectly polished and smooth. I want these to look really bumpy. Rough. Yeah, that looks pretty good. So let's continue this process. Keep adding your shadows and highlights into these different areas until everything is really popping off of that page. Thank you. Whenever you're right. So, um, take a quick moment, just show you, since we are, you're able to zoom in with these digital coloring pages, were able to see these little spots that didn't recolor really easily. Some in turn, alpha lock off. Come in here with this dark purple, a really small brush. And it's in a color that in my hand. And that's an all we need to do that filled in that spot. Here's one tiny pixel right there. So turn alpha lock off, choose a really small brush. Make sure you're on the right layer and fill in any little tidbits here. The dynein carry colored or did not work with the dropping fill. So that's how he did that. I mentor and Apple act back on and finishing. Okay. Hey, there. Okay. So here's the deal. So for this coral, I kinda the same idea where I lay down a base of texture. And then I'm coming in here and adding in some unique highlights and shadows into each of these little spots here, which is a little time-consuming, but that's kinda fun part of coloring. And so you kind of get lost in it is adding in those details, making things really pop up. Here. I'm varying up my color a little bit. And I can already tell that probably I'm going to come in and change the color of this coral later. But I'm at least getting something in here. So that way there is color to change. And that's just pretty amazing that I've got all of these different brush types and colors at my fingertips inside Procreate. Whereas if I recoloring traditionally this would be a lot harder. I'd have to have a lot of supplies out and may not even have all of the supplies to do this. Because I changed up my brush a bit here. Right now I'm using one of them cells to give me a different effect than that colored pencil. Cool. Ok, I was getting earlier with the 6 B pencil. So feel free to change up your brush throughout your coloring pages because you started with one doesn't mean you have to stick with it. It's gonna come in here and put a little bit darker. I'll probably call this good and just a moon, because I can always come back to it later. And I think that's looking pretty decent.
11. Highlights and Shadows Part 3 (Seaweed + Hair): Okay, we finished up our core 0. Let's go ahead and tackle our seaweed next. And I think I'm gonna go ahead and change up my brush a little bit. I was using the pastel brush for the coral. I'm going to go to one of the charcoal brushes. I'm going to use the carbons stick on the seaweed. And my approach here is going to be to make some light tops and dark at the bottom. And to really pay attention to where her body would be blacking a lot of the light on some of these and just start to make this seaweed a little more interesting. Now, so that we don't make the same mistake I meet with my seashell or earlier, let's make sure alpha lock is turned on on all my other layers. And it looks like it is remember it's a two fingers swipe to the side. But if that's giving you trouble, just tap that layer here and choose Alpha lock in that menu. So Alpha lock is on, on my seaweed, so we are good to start coloring. I'm going to start by laying in some really dark green down at the bottom. Always double-checking on the right layer. Let's go ahead and test out and see how our brush looks. It's probably gonna be way too small. Let's see, that looks pretty good. And I kinda put just a base layer of texture over the whole area right here. And then I'll build it up darker and darker. More brushstrokes. Maybe go even a little darker right there. So I'm gonna go ahead and do this same process to all of them. I find it really fun to change up my brush type when I'm coloring between them. Colored pencil or the 6 B pencil. Crayon, the charcoal brushes. But you can definitely stick to just one if you want it to be super consistent texture all across the board. This piece is probably gonna be pretty dark since it's blocked by her body and her hands. That's looking pretty good. Let's come back in here with a brighter green. And I'm going to shift it a little more towards the yellow is because I think that makes it even more interesting. I'm excited to see what you guys end up doing with your coloring pages. So definitely make sure to upload it. You're coloring page into the projects on a senior Creativity Inc. My brush a little smaller here. So we can make some tighter details in here. A little later. Don't forget to really zoom out once and awhile to see how it's looking overall. And if you're not sure how to do that with the gesture, it's a quick pinch motion with your fingers like that and it will snap it to fill the screen. So even if you're really crazy, zoomed in anywhere you are just snap with your fingers. Okay, so I think I'm going to get a really saturated dark color here. And I'm going to kind of accent these lines that go down the middle of the CV and see how my brush looks too big. Like that. Really show up on those lighter spots. Darker, smaller brush. And don't forget if at any point it feels too textured or like it just didn't blend in. Pulled down on your smudge tool to use the same brush and just blend that back-end. And then if you overdo it with your blending, come back with the regression, add it back in a little bit, just keep building those layers up and up. Just like if we recoloring traditionally. Part of the problem was my blending brush was way too big. Here we go. So again, let's say I just got rid of too much there. I want it to come back, grab a brush back, and build that back up. So I am just going to continue filling this seaweed and until I'm happy with it. And the next we'll move onto her hair. Alright, so let's call this seaweed. Good for now. I can always come back in and add more texture and color later. I'm going to go ahead and move on to her hair. So let's go find the hair layer alpha lock is there are a couple of different things we can do with her hair. We can either go in with the same brushes we've been using. So I've been bouncing back and forth between the 6 B pencil, the pastels, and the charcoal. Or we can do a really fun effect with a brush that actually is imitating pieces of hair, strands of hair. And I'll show you where that one is. So what I'm gonna do right now though, is go ahead and get my purple hair color here. It's going to clear my history so that way I can have a cleaner view right here of my hair colors. All right, let's go find that brush. So go to touch ups. And there's a brush called flowing here. There's also fine hair, short hair. I find the flowing hair to be more fun. What you usually wanna do is I start with the darker colors for hair and build it up to the light. Which if we were coloring traditionally might be kinda hard to do it this way. But that's what makes digital coloring fun. We can break all the rules. So I'm going to find a more saturated, darker version and just kinda show you what this brush does. And when I use this brush, I want to follow the lines of the line work here of her hair so that it actually looks like it's following that flow. And I can see there's a little spot here we're going to need to fix with that little trick I showed you earlier, but we'll worry about that in a few minutes. So this brush looks too big, but you can see the effect that's happening. It's making strands of hair. And that's probably a little too small now you just have to play with that too. You get the right size in Azure first putting in these first few layers or hair, you don't have to follow those lines to until you at least get some texture built up. But it will make it a little easier in the long run if you can kind of follow, follow the lines. Okay, so we want to just kinda keep building this up. All right, I'm ready to land some brighter color. Keeping in mind where my light is coming from, it's coming from above. You don't want to totally get rid of all my darks, so that's probably enough. And now I'm gonna go even brighter and more towards a pink. Or this way. I'm going to lower the opacity just a little bit. The more bright spots that we put in this hair and the more concentrated and we make them the shinier her here is going to look. So I will often like where we've got these curves right here, I'm going to start with light pressure, press harder and then let go harder and let go. And I'm gonna make this kinda like a shiny spot right here in her hair. Lanugo even brighter. And do the same thing in this little spot. And if I ever feel like I've overdone it, I'll just come back in with some darks again and just keep layering, layering, layering like I keep saying, this area down here should probably be darker, so let's bring back that color. I don't want it to look too flat, so I still want a few bright hairs. And here, another way that we can add some more shadow and highlight is go ahead and switch your brush back to the ones we were using before. So for me I could switch back to my 6 B pencil. And I'm going to choose something really light first. And I'm gonna just kinda put an overall texture on here. Really big brush. Somewhere about 50 percent opacity to start. I think that's a little bit too, too much. I'm going to lower the opacity even more. And I'm just going to lightly brush in a texture overall to make it look a little more similar to the rest of my coloring. And then I'll really kinda bright in, in some of these spots here. So I still am seeing that hair texture brush, but I'm also adding in that texture of May 6 B pencil. And then I'll choose something darker. I'm going to rotate it just because it's easier for my hand. And I'll kinda put it in a darker layer down here once more. Maybe some darkness around this seashell here. I can even follow these coloring page lines with this brush to soften them so that it doesn't just look like a black line. If I wanted to, you don't have to do that. All right. So just keep working on this hair until you are totally happy with it.
12. Highlights + Shadows Part 4 (Tail): Okay, we are ready to start coloring in her tail. Let's go find that layer. There's the tail, the tail and bra, and I should say. And I started with this kind of minty green color here. And I don't exactly have a plan in my head right now for how I want to color this, I'm probably just going to keep building layers of color here. And we'll kind of experimentally find something we like. I'll probably just grab something similar to that bright color. I am going to use the 6 B pencil. But these pastels and a crayon would be really fun to make sure Alba lack is good. Turn up the opacity on my brush. This is probably too big. Let's test it. That's too small. Still a little small and ML lower the opacity now, that's looking pretty good. So we're going to think about our shadows here. Her hair would be making this area pretty dark, so I'm just going to lay in some shadow. All right. In here as well. I'm definitely going to be changing up my color a bit because I want her tail to have some of that shiny iridescent quality that the seashell does need to go a little darker. That's looking better and giving it some dimension. Even darker. And I'm going to shift towards blue. That's looking pretty good. Now, I'm going to make my brush really big. Bring the opacity down and do that same technique where I'm just going to brush in some overall texture on the whole thing. Just to give me a base to build up from. Because sometimes if you don't have a base of texture down, it'll start to look way too obvious when you go to put in your first couple of strokes of your pencil or brush whatever you're using. And so I like to do this just to take away some of the fear of, Oh my God, what did I just do? It remember, we can always smudge or blend some of this away. And I am holding my pencil on its side, since I'm using the 6 B pencil, if I were coloring with a coloring pencil or colored pencil, I would hold my pencil on its side to get more contact onto the paper. So I'm using that same idea with the Apple Pencil. If you are using an Apple pencil to color. All right, so this is now not looking quite as contrast use I want, so I'm going really dark. Because I can always brighten it back up. Okay, That's looking pretty decent. You definitely need more color in this tail though. We need to bring it to life. I think what would be really fun is to either use something in this area here that's kinda see, see green-blue, aqua colors or to even come over to purple. Let's just see what purple will look like. I bet you already know what I'm going to say though. We can always change our color later. You could also, if you wanted to experiment with something but didn't want to lose some progress you've already made. We could make a new layer here. And what I could do is turn on a clipping mask so that it will only affect her tail. I'm above the tail layer. See, this is the tail. This is the new layer I just made. I'll hit Clipping Mask. And now it will still remain inside the boundary of the tail. But let's just say I want to come in here and put some of this purple in here. But I want to save this on its own layer in case later I'm like, gosh, what was I thinking? Let's get rid of that. So let's just kinda see how that looks. That's kinda looking a little too perfect. I don't know that the smudge tool is gonna kinda lightens that a bit. So that's better. So let's try that effect. I'm gonna kinda come in here and follow these lines. I'll smudge them just a bit to soften them. Just to kind of build up some interest in this tail. Now if you're doing one of the coloring pages that have more defined scales, that might feel a little daunting. But start by putting down a base layer of texture. And then kinda doing that same idea that we did with the coral, excuse me. Let yourself to zone out and just start filling those scales in. Okay, so that does give a really cool shiny effect. I do like that. I'm going to choose a really light pink now and make a couple of highlights, spots in here. And that is starting to look nice and shiny. And then maybe I'll come back with this minty color, even a lighter version of it though. All right. I like the effect we have on her little seashell bra. Going to come back to these and grab my smudge, make sure that it was using the current brush and just lightly soften these up. I'm going to up the opacity of it. So it doesn't have to work as hard. And I kinda vary up the direction that I go in when I use the smudge tool. Sometimes I even go in little circles. That looks pretty good. Zoom out. All right, that tail is definitely starting to look interesting. Let's do the highlight pink colors on here though, because I loved how that looked on the Brock. So let's grab the pink. And I think I'm going to start by laying in a little bit towards the top where there would be plenty of light hitting her tail. And do that up here as well. Let's lower the opacity. And I'm still on a different layer. So if I decide that after I put some of the stuff in here, that it just does not work for me, but I still liked this base layer of texture. I can go turn this layer off. Just like this. Come over here, hit this little box and you can see what it looks like with and without. So I kinda like the direction it's going. So I'm gonna keep I'm gonna keep on women pushing forward with what I'm doing here. All right, Maybe what I'll do is just kinda come in here and put some pops of this pink. And I think a mermaid tail is something you could spend a long time coloring. Okay, So I think our tail is looking a little too pass style for me, so I'm gonna grab something a little more saturated, Excuse me, a little more towards purple. Can come in here. Perhaps a color. I can fix this later too, as I keep alluding to. So not going to let myself panic about not liking what I have done. Basic principle balance. Jeff, I think I will end up coming back over the top of what I've done with that green color again now just like I did with the Bronze, plan, them all of it. Okay. Okay. So I still feel like this needs more contrast to it. I'm going to change up my brush and I'm going to choose, let's try the oil pastel first. Choose a darker color here. And I'm just going to lay in whew, that was a huge brush. Didn't even see what was happening in there for a second. Now, lower the opacity, change my brush size. I don't quite see it. There we go. Okay, So it has links. I'm down. I'm just going to bring in some darks here. And since my brushes kinda big, I'm staying on the outside here because I can see it laying in there. Well, if you guys can see what was happening right in there. So I'm just kind of approaching the edge until I see it being put down on to the tail. So I'm gonna undo the accident one I like that. That was just to show you. I'm going to do the same idea for some highlights. I'm going to grab a really light version of that minty color and just kinda bring that in here. And I might just kinda pressure really lightly along the tops here. Okay, So I think that's starting to look a little better. Okay. So let's just see if we turn this off. Do we like the direction we went? I think so. And I think I'll like it even more later when I play with a little bit of magic. The other thing I could do is say, I like what I did, but I felt like I overdid it. I could even turn the opacity down on this a little bit and see how that's working. But I'm gonna go ahead and leave mine up. Either full force are really close. Okay. Now, we need to take care of that water in the background because right now and that looks really boring.
13. Highlights + Shadows Part 5 (Water, Jewelry, + Bubbles): Okay, Let's talk water. Right now it looks really, really flat. So let's start by going in selecting our water layer. I am going to use, try the charcoal brush, really large, low opacity. I'm going to choose this watercolor by holding with my finger. And then I'm going to come to a darker, more saturated version. Let's see how this looks. That's working. Well lay in a little bit of darkness down here. Wow, that's already starting to make things come to life. Awesome. Okay, Now let's choose something brighter. Shipped a little towards aqua. Am I put that up here? Box that's looking so much better. Alright, even brighter. We're imagining. We've got some sunlight coming through the water down this way. Still not bright enough. All right. We're getting close. Good. Layers, layers, layers. Now I need to come back with that dark color again. My Brayton act a little bit of it away and I'm going to hit these corners pretty heavy. Guess that really makes things look magical when we have plenty of contrast going on and a really deep blue ocean effect. But you'd have your coloring and different kind of coloring page. Make sure you've got plenty of contrast. Oops, too heavy. Heavy. Thank goodness for digital. Expat. The tap of two fingers. Okay, That is looking fabulous. Now, if you wanted to get even more whimsical with this, you could shift up here towards like a yellow color and you could pretend or like an orangey color. And you could pretend it's like a sunset color coming down through the water. This is our coloring page. We make the rules. That's pretty cool. Okay, so I do want to show you another magical brush. If you are doing a water background, this is built into procreate is kinda fun. And it gives us an effect that makes it actually looked like water is it has light coming through it. You can either use the ocean or the water. It's under elements. It's under the Elements tab in your brush library. So I'm going to choose the water, and I'm going to choose a very light blue. And I'm gonna make this pretty large. I'm going to up the opacity and let's just see. Wow, Okay, so that's too big. I need to make it smaller, but you guys see the effect, right? How fun? So I'm gonna make this a little smaller. Brush this in here. Now again, I could have put that on its own layer too, just in case I wanted to turn that off later, but I'm pretty happy with that. The only thing is I'm going to undo it and I'm going to not do it so heavily down here at the bottom. And Mr. mostly right about where she is and go up in these lighter areas where the light would actually be touching a little more. And this is one of those that you kind of build it up. The more I brushed over it, the more obvious these lines become. So I like that effect a lot. I'm going to leave mine like that. If you don't like that water effect, don't add it in and just add in those bright and dark spots because that part's important. All right, let's go in and tackle the Lipson. Enjoy really quick. They're pretty small bits, so it won't take us too long. My, my ellipse layer might come back to my pencil, 6 B pencil. Now choose her lip color. I'll do something darker stir. Since this is such a tiny part of the coloring page, don't spend too much time on it unless it makes you happy. Since it is such a tiny spot, you will need to go more exaggerated with your choices here if you actually want it to show up at all. So that works. I can see that zoomed out a little bit. We'll call that good for her lips. Let's go to the jewelry. We won't do a whole lot here either. But I'm going to choose that yellow color, go more towards orange. I'm going to make these look like gold, I believe is what I'm going for. You can make these any color you wanted though. Whether you wanted it to look like metal or maybe you want it to be a totally different color. I want these to look more like pearls. So I'm going to choose something that is, this is like a periwinkle color. There's some grays and whites down here. I'm going to start with this periwinkle color. And I'm gonna kinda lay in over all of the pearls. And I'm going in a circular motion around these to help me make things look round. I feel, when I do that, it actually helps me create a rounded effect. Whereas if I were just coloring back and forth, I would get some lines going in these up and down directions that I don't actually want. Okay, I'm gonna choose something darker to come around the outside. There's some extra fun. Let's choose this light pink. And I've put that in. Let's go even darker. Over here. Parallels are kinda the same idea as a seashell. Couple different colors into these little spaces will really make all the difference. Okay, let's go back to the pink. Let's make it a little more obvious. And then on top of that I might do a teeny bit of yellow. Make my brush a little smaller. So these are such tiny, subtle things. You may not really even be able to see this at all once we've backed out. And that's okay. I had fun doing it. Okay. Yeah. That is very tiny. You can't tell. That's okay. Last little bit of jewelry here was this pearl necklace or whatever you want it to be. Ladies and really contrast here, then I'm going to smudge it around. And a little more contrast to that. And then I'm gonna move on. Perfect. Let's do some bubbles. Let's go find our bubbles layer. You can go as realistic or as simple as you want with your bubbles. I don't tend to go overly realistic with them. Choose this color that I had for my bubble. And I'm gonna go darker first because I like to start with putting in my darks and then working back to my light. When I'm working digitally, I'm going to choose the oil pastel. And I'm going to lower my opacity but put my brush up. Let's see how this looks. My on my boat. Okay, I'm on my bubbles layer, it's on Alpha Lock. That's important for when we do these bubbles in MS start by layering in some darks in these bottom corners of the bubbles. Like this. Zoom in so you can kinda see. So that's what I'm doing on each of these bubbles. I know some people really love coloring bubbles. They really love putting in those details and getting really picky about making them look as bubbly as they can. So feel free to spend a lot of time on these if that makes you happy. You very easily look up some reference photos of what a bubble would look like. And you can imitate that lighting. Where the highlights are, where the shadows are. To make them look, see-through and shiny. Wanted to be pretty dark around these edges because then I like to come back in and put a pop of highlight right at the edge. Now, even if I did nothing else to these bubbles, they're already looking pretty cool. So if you feel overwhelmed by adding in more, let that be enough. That's fine. This is about having fun and relaxing, not stressing you out. Just that little bit already brought them to life now. And they are looking more bubbly. They don't look so flat. But if you want to keep going, I'm going to switch back to my 6 B pencil now so that I have more control. Choose something really light, probably almost white. And then I need a bigger brush. I want it to be at full opacity there. And I want to do that idea. So since alpha lock is on, I can be on the outside here when I'm drawing. And then just to make sure it's really just hitting the edge. So as I'm doing this, to save myself some time, I'm going to also go ahead and put in the highlight that's going to be over here. Or it could be up here since that's where your light is coming. Put it in wherever you please. I'm going to actually put in kinda like maybe two on some of these bigger bubbles. This one on the smaller ones. Okay, so I think I hit all of my bubbles. I'm pretty happy with this. You guys feel free to spend as much time on these as you want. And if you're not even doing under the sea page, well then you don't have to do bubble zone. Okay? Remember you can always come back in with your darker blue color and just do a couple of touch ups if you see any that are sticking out to you for all the wrong reasons, you might want to spend some time on the bigger ones if you want them to look like bubbles. And so those are the ones you'll see more. When you zoom back out. I think overall this coloring pages looking really fantastic, things are popping off of the page. Now is the time where if you want to refine anything, where if you want more darks and lights, go in to those layers again and make your adjustments. Go in, in, touch things up if they look a little too flat still, or if you want more texture, now's the time to do that. So spend as much time as you need to touching up any of those areas. All right, after this, we're going to start waving our magical arms around and changing things that we never could have if we were coloring traditionally. So get out your cauldrons and spell books. I'm just kidding. This is actually going to be a lot easier than spell casting. So I'll see you in the next video.
14. Magical Recoloring Techniques: All right, are you guys ready to practice some magic? Let's say, I totally regret some of my color choices. If I recoloring traditionally, it would be a tragedy. After spending so many hours filling this page in. Ide after mourn over my coloring page, and feel like it was just ruined forever. However, digitally, this is an opportunity. We can change anything anytime throughout this process. But first, let's make a duplicate of our coloring page just in case we decide that our instincts were actually right in the first place. So let's go back out to gallery. Let's swipe and hit Duplicate on our coloring page and just open up one of those now. So now we have this saved as it's original version back in the gallery. We can go back to it at any time. Okay, now that I'm on the duplicate, let's say I've decided that I really feel like her tail is not jumping off of the page enough. I can fix that. What I'm going to start by doing is emerging these two layers together. So I do that by kinda grabbing both in pinching, I'll show you one more time. I'm going to undo two fingers, tap so it undid that merging. So two fingers and I'm going to hold down on both in the kind of squeeze them together. So those are now on one layer. What we're going to do is come over here to our magic wand. We're going to come to hue, saturation and brightness. And then choose layer. If we chose pencil, we would be going in and doing adjustments by hand. But I went the whole tail layer to change. Here's where you could end up spending a lot of time because this is kind of addicting. We're just going to move this slider around and look at all the different options. Holy cow, This is fun. Okay. What do I like? Try not to get overwhelmed here. I'm going to bump the saturation up just a hint and the brightness up just a touch there. Okay, so that's probably blending into the water a little too much, even though I absolutely love those colors. The green is fun. The more pink is really fun. So if I ever want to go back, you just need to get that back to 50 percent and that's what you started out with. The other thing you can do is let's say I find something. I'm like, oh, you know, this is interesting. I think I like it, but I don't know. Is it better than the original? Tap your finger. And this little menu will pop up. Hold down preview, that's the original. That's what I currently have these settings at. Original new settings. Okay. I do not like. My new choice. Let's come this way. That's interesting. Okay. Bump up the saturation. What if I go darker? Nope, don't like it. Let's go a little brighter. I like it. Let's apply it. So tap Apply. So it now changed that layer. And remember, I still have the original back in the gallery. So if I'm like, oh golly afterwards, what did I do? Totally fine. Okay, so next let's try re-coloring some of these sea plants and the coral. I'm gonna go to this coral first. Again, select the layer. Come up here to the Adjustments, Hue, Saturation and Brightness layer. Let's see what kind of fun we can have here. Think mostly I just wanted to bump up the saturation a bit and just make a very slight adjustment towards a more pinkie coral feel. So very tiny adjustment I just made. Let's tap and preview. It. Could couple of little changes. Okay. I'm actually happy with that. So I'm at 48 percent. I'm just gonna remember that. But I'll show you a couple of sliding options here because this is fun. So feel free to go with whatever makes your heart happy. I'm going to apply that small change. I'm going to come to the next plant here. Let's see. Kinda went a little dark. So I'm going to brighten that up just a bit. Like kinda like this orangey color. Let's go with that. I kinda glows. Let's come to the seaweed. Try the same thing. You make them a little more saturated, a little brighter. Zoom out since we've got seaweed above and below there, we want to be able to see it. Now again, just because this is seaweed doesn't mean it has to be green, make it whatever color you want. This is a fantasy scene. There are no right and wrong choices. I think all I'm gonna do is just adjust my greens a little bit to be a little more yellow. That's all I'm gonna do. Brighten them a tiny bit and let's see what that looks like. Yeah, I'm happy with that. Apply. Okay, Hooray. To have even more fun. Let's tackle that hair. And I'm going to show you a totally different way to recolor. So let's go find the hair layer. There it is. Come back up here to the land or the adjustments, but go down to Gradient Map. Hit layer. And it already applied one for me here in the middle. That's kind of a blue gradient. These gradients are really fun because it's going to give us a range of different colors between the darks and lights. So let's just flip through these. These are so much fun. All my gosh, is that beautiful? I like the red hair. That's fun. If you wanted kinda like a silver haired Mermaid. That's really pretty cool. I like that a lot. That's called Blaze. You're going to see some in here on mine that you don't have and that's because I made my own. Now I'll show you how to do that really quick. Okay, so let's start on. Actually, it doesn't matter what you start out when you go to make your own, but you can make adjustments to the US. The only thing is if you do change these, they kinda stay that way forever and I'm not sure how to get them back to the way they work. So make your own by going to the plus right here. And what you're doing is you're choosing colors that are going to replace the blacks, the whites and everything in between. So I'm going to leave the black being straight black. I'm going to add a box by tapping. And let's say I want to go to something kinda aqua colored. And then something here when we wanna kinda shift. So this might be a little too bright. I'm going to darken this down a bit. And then I want something a little brighter and then even brighter. Now you could also get a little crazier by changing the color in these as well. So let's say maybe I want it to shift a little towards like a pink when it gets bright. So can you see that change that it's making? Some of those really bright highlights are turning pink. And this is how we make the gradient. You can put several different boxes in here. You can leave it more simple. If you want to get rid of one, you hold down until this little trashcan pops up and get rid of it. You can slide these around after you've placed them. So that's really pretty. So if I just tap off of this, actually you can also name it if you want to. So we could call this aqua and hit Done. And now it's going to save it down here in the gradient library and zoom out. So that's really pretty, but I want to go back to one of those red versions. Either the blaze, which is a built-in gradient, or the one that I built called poppy. I like how dramatic the poppy is, but the blaze might work better for this scene. So I'm going to leave that on blaze. Just kinda has a certain look to her. Does she look like a certain mermaid anyone's familiar with? Okay. So I'm going to hit apply. And that might have done it twice. Yep. So I'm just going to tap off of it. All right. So we can continue doing this with everything else on here too. We could add a gradient to things or we can go in and do the hue saturation. Let's just see what it would look like to throw a gradient on the water. So I've selected my water layer, one gradient map layer, holy moly, that is fun, but a little crazy. So let's just cycle through these. Wow, that gives it such a almost Halloween vibe. That's magical. I kinda like that. That's called Venice. That's a built-in gradient. The Aqua that I made a few minutes ago is really pretty. So you can see how this just totally changes the feel of your entire coloring page. And that's this addicting and fun. What if we keep this one? I'm going to keep this one for now. I might change my mind later. Because again, I do really like the blues and how it pops with her hair. Just to show you a totally different look. So maybe now I need to change that seashell since my background is kinda making it blend in a little bit. And I think I'm gonna do that with a hue saturation and brightness instead of the gradient map. Okay? Again, don't forget, you can always do this. Now since bubbles should kind of be reflecting their surroundings, they're not really the right color for this background. Not again, that there are any rules here, but they might need to be that Venice color to actually look like they're picking up the colors from the background. And I think it did it twice again. So I'm just going to tap off of there. So that is how we can make changes to this.
15. Bonus - Adding Inky Details + Embellishments: Alright, so I have a couple more tricks to show you. And one of them is adding in some fun key details. Sometimes you'll want even more line work or details on top of your coloring. And that can be almost as fun as the shading. So for example, I like to sometimes come in and add really cool swirly tattoos to my mermaids. Or I love to add in extra stars to the sky and little dots and sparkles to give things that extra magical touch. So to do something like that, we need to make a new layer. We don't want to ruin any of our hard work of coloring that can't be undone. So nondestructive here, make a new layer. And I've put it on top of everything except for the reference layer. And you can choose any brush you want to here to add in your details. A lot of times I like to work with this Syrup brush, which is already built in. It's under inking. But it can also work to use that six B pencil or whatever you were using previously to really match the same texture. I'm going to come back to the syrup brush. I'm going to choose black, double-tap down here to get the black set. And then I like to just add in little tattoos are little details and Matt is way too big. Let's adjust. And I'll change the opacity a little bit so that it doesn't look too contrasty. But I just kinda like to do little details like this because it just adds in a little bit more fun and personality into your coloring. And that cert brush really does kinda give a tattoo vibe. Okay, so let's call that good. You can even come in and kinda give the mermaid more makeup if you wanted to. This way, you could add little sparkles in details. Now just to show you what it could look like with the pencil really quick, come back to sketching 6 B pencil. So that does match her skin texture a little better. But I just like that Syrup brush quite a bit for tattoos especially. But what I could do with my pencil on this, I can either stay on this layer or if I'm lying to be extra in control here, I can make another layer for any other line work I want to add in. And you could add in things like veining on your seaweed if you wanted to. You could add in different textures on your plants and you quarrel. Can add any details here that you see fit. You could come in and if you had the patients, you could give her more of a scallop tail. Again, that's if you feel like doing something like that. And for that, I would recommend just doing like a few here and there instead of filling the whole thing in, just to give a hint at it. Just to give you some ideas here of some extra fun ways to embellish these coloring pages even more with some inky details. Again, I can always turn this layer off if I decide I just went to wild. Okay, so another way that we can add some fun inky details, let's make another layer. If you're running out of layers on your iPad, which I think you should still be fine even with a different kind of iPad. But if you're running out, just combine a few things that you don't mind being on the same layer. You can also go back into your gallery, make another duplicate of this so that you're not ruining anything in the long run. And then come back, combine a few things, make a new layer. So I'm on a new layer. I'm gonna change my blend mode to Linear Light. I'm gonna come over here. I'm going to keep my six B pencil and I'm going to choose a light gray color. Now, anything I do on this layer is going to make a lighter version of whatever I'm coloring on top of color wise. So let's say I want to add in something to my seaweed here. You kinda makes this yellowy, lighter green version because I'm in this linear light blending mode. So that kinda gives a cool effect. And I'll show you what it looks like on top of another color too, so you can see what I mean, how it lightens. Whatever you're on top of. You see how that did that. There was more of a bluish green and so the color, instead of being yellow, shifted towards that bluish green. Oops, over here and do some rain on this seaweed. A really quick here. And then up here. Like these ones almost needed to go all the way since these are higher up, closer to our light source. Again, I went into this with no plan on these inky details. I'm just doing what feels right. It's kinda following some weird instinct. Spend as much or as little time on this part as you'd like. If you're not interested in the drawing, you just want a color. You do not have to do this part. This is just a fun way to really personalize a coloring page. Make it yours on top of the cool colors you put in. Okay, so let's go to a different section so you can see how this affects color. It's just going to grab something lighter. And so this is actually looking kinda like pure white here. And what you may have to do is adjust your level of gray. I may need to go just a little darker so that it doesn't do pure white or this linear light. Now it's grabbing a little bit more of the pink. And now those highlights probably wouldn't actually be in those spots. But just to show you how this works, these definitely should probably have a little bit of brightness on them. And it might be fun to put a pattern on these of some sort with the lighter color. Now, alternatively, if you wanted those to be dark lines instead of light, we would just change the blending mode. Come back to the layer that we just put those lines on. Come where it says LL. And we'll just shift this up to a color burn. And you'll see that those lines now get dark or you know, there's Linear Burn, which is a little bit darker even. There's multiply, which is a little harder to see. So I would either go with linear or Color Burn tool. I'll just leave it on linear so you can see really quick that difference. And so that does make all of my lines on my seaweed darker too, since I have that all on one layer. So I'm just going to flip mine back to Linear Light now, but you can see how that works. You can make a couple of different layers like that now and change between the blending modes to really come back in and add several different detail layers. All right, so one other fun thing I want to show you is adding a splatter effect. So I'm gonna make a new layer here. I'm going to come in to the water section and go to water Flix. Now if you wanted to, this is one where you could download some brushes from other folks that have really cool splatter brushes. But this one will work. I'm going to change my blend mode. I'm going to try Color Burn. I'm going to put it on this coral. And let's just see how this looks. I'm going to make this pretty small. It's kinda tap these inherence, see how it looks. And some went outside my choral, I'm just going to erase that. That's kinda fun. It gives it a different texture. And we can change the blending mode here in a second in case we want, oh, I'm sorry, my eraser. Goodness. We can change the blend mode here in a second to see what it would look like to go lighter instead of darker. Get rid of that little guy. Rogue splatter. Okay, Let's try linear light. So it's still darker because I was using a dark gray, something to think about beforehand. I did like the color burn though. The linear burn is not going to be as colorful. So I'm gonna change it back to color burn. And I didn't notice one went outside of my coloring page here at some point. So I'll just erase that now that I can see it in the different mode. Now another option would be to drag that down to my core layer and make it into a clipping mask so that that wouldn't happen. Those little splatters wouldn't go outside of the coral, but I don't mind just erasing them away really quickly. We can turn that off and on. So if you like it, leave it, if you don't turn it off. But that's just another fun way to add in some details to use something like a splatter brush. You can might even do it on this rock that could look really cool. I'll show you what it looks like to use the clipping mask one more time. Make sure I'm on the splatter yet water flip. Let's come up to a lighter gray. So that's really fun. And I think I'm in a normal blending modes. So let's just see what that looks like if we change this. So that's color burn, linear burn, linear light. Okay, liked one of the burn modes a little better. I'll probably go with color burn. Okay, So really quick, on a totally different coloring page, I want to show you another way to add some fun inky details that are more relevant to different types of scenes like stars. I'll follow that same method, making a new layer, putting Linear Light and grabbing a light gray color. And it might be a little too light. And I'm going to lower my opacity. And I can kinda just I can make the already there stars pop a little more. Or I can make my own stars with various techniques. That version of a star's kinda fun. I'll show you what the CRT brush can do with that. I actually really like doing this with the syrup brush instead of the pencil. Because it has that tapered effect, which looks really cool when adding stars. You can add kind of a glow around things that might be a little easier to do with the pencil, but you'll just have to really play with this and find something that makes your coloring page super fun. Another thing I always like to do if I have stars like this and I coloring page is, I'll add like these light lines to show that it's glowing. So just to give you an idea of things you could do on a different kinda coloring page other than a mermaid. Flowers are fun ones to add little details too. All of these lessons apply to any kind of coloring page you wanna do, right? Add in some highlights on these windows. Can come in here and add in some little details in these bushes. I mean, really endless options, guys, if I want this to go darker, change your grade down to a much darker gray. Or throw your blending mode into Color Burn or Linear Burn, and then everything will go darker. Okay, so that wraps up our fun, inky details. I can't wait to see your color choices and your fun inky details, what textures you use if you throw on some gradient maps, I'd love to see that alternate versions of your coloring pages. So share things with me in the projects below.
16. Bonus Coloring Timelapses For Inspiration: Hello. Okay. Let's go. And and and the, the way through the three words. Wait. Okay. All right. Hi. Hi. Good. Hello.
Melanie Bess, Painting By The Light Of The Moon
