Coloring digital art is different than coloring it traditionally because there are a ton of great advantages digital can offer.
This is a guide on how to color digital art for beginners while taking advantage of the digital part.
Coloring digital art can be done using the same methods traditionally or by taking advantage of programs features like Photoshop. You can manually color in your flats then add shading and highlights using layers.
Or you can automatically fill in colors either flat or using gradients and patterns. Using 3d programs you can even automatically get realistic coloring and lighting.
As a digital artist, I will be going through coloring one of my drawings in the video below and turning it into a digital painting. You can follow along step by step and learn exactly how I color it digitally from start to finish.
*Note the reference art used is by Derek Laufman, an amazing artist who has worked for Marvel, Warner Bros., Disney Publishing.
How to Color Digital Art for Beginners
Now as this guide is for beginners I will of course start with basics but I will cover the entire process. Coloring digital art can be split into three main stages: flat coloring, shading, and lighting.
All these parts are NOT needed or the ONLY correct way to color digital art. You can even do the first stage and stop there, or the first two.
Some people will even consider shading and lighting two parts of the same stage and that is perfectly fine. I will simply be covering each on it’s own to simplify the digital painting process.
These stages are the most broad and complete set of different coloring techniques I have found. Both when researching artists like Derek Laufman and Marc Brunet as well as from my own experience.
First I will just be giving a brief overview of the entire process. Then I will be providing more in-depth steps of each of the stages of coloring digital art.
Much like drawing, coloring digital art is not entirely different from traditional, but the tools and methods are completely different and objectively better from an efficiency standpoint.
Digital drawing softwares use features and tools like layers, blending modes, color editing, all of which enable you to do so much more than when coloring traditional art.
This is also why it’s sometimes referred to as digital painting.
Stage 1: Flat Colors
I would recommend limiting yourself to about 3 colors for your first time coloring digital art.
This will keep it simple enough for you to be able to focus on learning first and coloring second but still produce a fully colored digital painting.
You don’t need the whole color wheel.
Start by choosing the colors that you will use the most for your art. So for my drawing of Iron Man, these are the red, yellow, and skin colors.
These will be your base or flat colors. Fill these in as needed.
Take advantage of your unlimited color palette digitally and experiment. Find out what colors you like and test them on your drawing.
Stage 2: Shading
Shading may be considered separate from coloring, however in the interest of providing a more complete guide I will be covering it next.
Shading provides the detail that makes the art appear more 3D and pop off the page. Colors amplify that effect making the art more realistic in a digital painting.
I will be shading using ambient occlusion. Ambient occlusion is shading caused by ambient lighting not one direct light source.
Stage 3: Lighting
Lighting your drawing with direct light sources allows you to highlight your focal points and give your art a certain mood.
Light the face of a character or spotlight a part of a scene. Eyes are drawn to light and as such you can control what you want your viewer to focus on.
That is a summary on how to color your digital art. Below I will be going through all of these stages in depth using my own drawing.
Quick Tip *I used a drawing tablet for this entire series and ALL my digital drawing & painting and I recommend you do too. Here is what I think is the best drawing tablet Wacom Cintiq 16 Drawing Tablet with Screen.
My example will be using reference artwork to focus the entire experience on learning how to color as a technique and avoid covering original art as that is a whole topic on its own.
If you would like you may work without a reference however color theory is a lot on its own. I will cover that in a separate blog post in the future and link here.
Now let’s start making digital art.
How Do You Make Flat Color Art? How to Color Digital Art: Stage 1
Flat colors as I will be using the term here are the base colors that make up the inherent color of an element of art without lighting and shading. The most important property being they are uniform and solid colors with no variation.
Now scientifically of course we know color is simply the light reflected off an object in our eyes so color can’t technically exist without lighting but that only applies to the real world.
For this blog post on digital painting, we will be covering lighting as part of coloring but first, we will set our base flats colors.
Digital Art Coloring – Flat Colors Actionable Steps:
Beginning with our flats already you can see the advantage we have digitally with coloring art.
We can use an eyedropper tool which is universal in most art programs, yes, including Microsoft Paint.
The eyedropper tool identifies the exact colors in images we open in the programs so we can use these for our base colors if accuracy is your goal.
However, if you’re looking to learn and train your eye on color then you may choose to eye it and choose your colors yourself.
Think about hue contrast or just use a color wheel. Don’t get overwhelmed with complex color theory.
Neither choice is good or bad it simply depends on what you, as an artist, want.
The beauty of coloring digital art is your color palette is never limited as you have access to every color there is.
Traditionally you’d be spending a lot of money on pencils, crayons, or paints for a fraction of the color variety.
Moving on to the actual coloring you can manually color in your art using a brush or you can use a fill tool to automatically do it.
The fill tool can be a huge time saver to preview how some different color combinations might work.
To use a fill tool the only requirement is having closed lines in your drawings with no openings so you can fill them.
If you have open elements you can simply use a selection tool to select the parts you’d like to separate with different colors and fill them in that way.
Changing colors on digital art is even easier and only takes one click!
Once you’re done coloring just pick a new color and use the paint bucket tool on the element you’d like to recolor and you are done.
Or you could use any color editing tool after selecting the area you’d like to change the color of.
For example, in Photoshop you could use the Hue/Saturation tool and change the color that way.
Once you’ve dialed in your colors, fill in the lines, and you are done with flat coloring your digital painting!
How Do You Shade When Coloring? How To Color Digital Art: Stage 2
Digitally coloring and shading is exciting because you can take advantage of many digital features for your digital painting.
For shading, there are two different ways to go about it at the broadest level. You can shade using colors or using black and white values. Neither way is wrong however for this guide I will be covering shading using only black-and-white values for simplicity.
As I discussed, color theory is a whole topic on its own I will cover it separately. We want to start with fewer colors to make sure we use them as best as we can.
In addition, as stated before shading can be tied into lighting as well. When done that way shading involves using a direct light source to identify areas to shade.
Again for simplification we will NOT be doing this and will only be shading using ambient occlusion. Ambient occlusion is simply shading caused by ambient lighting.
In the future, I will be covering shading in a blog post on its own where I will go through both methods and possibly include it later on in this post or link it here.
Keep in mind you are not locked in to what I will be doing, do whatever you would like to color your art. You can shade with direct lighting, or ambient light, or combine direct lighting colors and ambient occlusion.
Below I show exactly how this ambient occlusion shading will look and how you would go about applying it on an actual drawing.
Digital Art Coloring Shading Actionable Steps:
For shading with black and white values you can start by duplicating your flat color layers and whiting them out. Basically, you will end up with another layer of your black-and-white drawing.
Shading layers will use the blending mode Multiply in Photoshop which “multiplies the base color by the blend color” always resulting in a “darker color” or dark shades.
This is perfect for shading as the darker color is exactly what you want. Most digital art programs have a similar equivalent blending mode to Photoshop’s multiply, GIMP and Procreate both use multiply.
No direct light source is used in ambient occlusion and so the only shading is caused by the actual volumes in the art blocking each other, overlapping, or creasing.
For example, if you were to draw a hole in an object the inside of that hole would be dark. The creases on shirts or pants, overlapping pieces of armor, and stacked objects, all of these would have shading caused by ambient occlusion.
Once you are done applying this black-and-white shading turn on your colors layer underneath and review your digital painting.
You can decide if you’d like to make adjustments to the shading depending on the material or texture of the parts you are shading.
For example, my Iron Man’s metallic suit will use harder-edged shading vs his skin where shading will be softer.
Applying this shading throughout the drawing the below image is what I arrived at.
How to Add Lighting to Digital Art? How To Color Digital Art: Stage 3
Make a copy of the flats layer, darken it, and set the Layer mode to Overlay.
The darkening is to offset the lighting you will apply so your drawing doesn’t end up washed out or over exposed.
In Photoshop Overlay allows patterns or colors to overlay the existing pixels while preserving the highlights and shadows of the base color. So find a feature that replicates this sort of behavior in your program.
Now you have to decide where the lighting will be coming from, up above or below, etc.
The more lighting you add the more complex it will be. For our purposes of coloring we will only be using one main light.
Colors will be used for lighting unlike the previous black and white shading we did.
The colors we will be using depending on the flat colors of the area you are painting. I just take the flat and brighten it up a lot and add a little warmth.
This depends on the type of light you want and it’s properties it’s brightness, warmth, color, etc. For us the bright and warm light is close to something like a natural sun.
That covers your shading layer.
That is how you color your digital art. Review your final results and see if you’d like to turn off some layers or reduce their opacity to get just the right look you want.
You can even work on adding background layers.
Thank you for reading till the end. Come back for future posts on more digital art topics!
