My coloring techniques + notes (Patreon)

It occurred to me that I haven't really been able to go in depth with my coloring process on my previous posts, so I've decided to make a standalone post to refer back to!

While I change things up in my process from time to time, these techniques sort of make up the core of how I do things. I do all of my coloring process in Clip Studio.

Choosing colors

There are a million guides and books and classes on color theory that are way, way better than anything I could ever type here, so I highly recommend doing a little google run! But that being said, I've personally found that it's difficult to retain that information without seeing it in action / getting a little hands-on application, so here are some things that have helped me:

1) Look at art with colors that you love and art that conveys the sort of feeling that you want to convey. Why is it successful? What purpose does each color serve? Which colors are saturated, if any, and which are dull? Do they contrast in hue or brightness? How are they placed, compositionally, and how do they affect the depth / where your eye falls / etc? Sometimes seeing how someone else has solved a problem can help you figure out how to solve your own.

While I do not recommend color picking someone else's image and then using those same colors in your own image, I do recommend color picking as a study tool to see where each color falls on your program's wheel to get a feel for how mixing works. You'll be surprised how surrounding colors can affect your perception - for example, the color of the leaves in my "Sweet Citrus" image is actually picked from the orange portion of the wheel, not the green!

2) A lot of people who swap to digital from traditional realize that choosing colors digitally is deceptively difficult! In many traditional mediums, your colors naturally mix together, the color of the surface peeks through enough to lend some amount of harmony to the image, and the colors are affected by the lighting of the room. None of that applies to digital art. If you choose bright neon green, you get pure, bright neon green.

There is a way to quickly add a bit of harmony to your image, though - layer blending modes. There are a ton of these, but I'm going to focus on overlay here. Create a layer above your color layer, fill it with whatever color you want to push your image toward, set that layer to overlay, and then change the opacity / tweak the fill color until you more or less like the result. It works like this (I'm using a fully merged image just because it's what I had on hand, I wouldn't recommend fully merging your image unless that's just how you like to work):

But as an aside - I recommend using overlay mostly as a learning tool / as a starting point for an image. If you like your result, study how each color is mixed on your color wheel and why it looks better to you. But using these colors as-is tends to feel a little artificial and monotonous, so any time I utilize this, I merge the overlay onto the color layer and then continue tweaking things manually from there.

3) If the image is complex, I don't start flatting right away - instead, I start roughly putting colors down with the brush tool. I feel like this helps me think on my feet more since I'm not fussing over cleaning it up as I go, and blotting colors over each other will sometimes accidentally lead to shapes and combinations that I end up liking a lot!

Flatting

My lineart has a lot of gaps, and Clip Studio's bucket tool saves my life every day. It isn't always perfect, but it's the best one I've ever used. I use three different versions of the bucket tool, and these are my usual settings + how each one works (the x shows where I clicked):

1) "Refer only to editing layer"
As its name implies, this only takes your current layer into account. If you don't have anything else on that layer, it will fill it completely.

2) "Refer other layers"
This takes other layers into account. Even if your current layer is blank, if there are any visible markings on any other layers, it will work around them. I usually turn on "Area scaling" for this one, since it pushes the color beyond the edge of the lineart, which helps fully fill the lines and avoids the white halo that other programs' fill buckets tend to leave. (Additional tip: you can hold it down and drag it along multiple spots rather than having to click each one individually!)

3) Close and fill
This one is interesting! Rather than just clicking, you'll use a lasso to draw around whatever you want to fill, making it great for detailed subjects that would be a hassle to fill with the previous tool. I turn on area scaling for this one, too.

I usually have to go back and clean things up a little. For that, I use either the eraser tool and the G pen, both with Anti-aliasing set to None. I don't do a whole lot of blending, so keeping my edges aliased makes it easier to replace colors with the fill bucket without getting the "halo" that often appears along softer edges. It's worth noting that I work at 350 dpi or larger, though - if you work smaller, the jagged hard edges may be more obvious.

One more note on the fill bucket: if you turn off "Follow adjacent pixel" and fill a color, it will fill that color anywhere it appears on that layer! I usually have "Color margin" set to 0, since this will only replace the exact color that you've clicked, but if you increase this setting it will start filling colors that are similar, too, which can be handy. (A few tools have the "Follow adjacent pixel" setting - I show it in action a little further down.)

Shading and texture

Recently I've been really into images that are flatter and aren't heavily shaded or rendered. One thing I've really been enjoying is adding in light rather than shadows - as in, instead of adding shadows to my base color, I add lighter tones so that the base color becomes the shadows. I feel like it lets me be a lot looser! I usually do this by choosing a couple of just *barely* lightened tones. I like how it adds just a bit of dimension to the image, but still reads as mostly flat. Here's an example:

Also, if I need a more subtle transition, or I just want something to feel a little less "clean," I'll apply a textured brush. My favorite is Clip Studio's "Tone scraping," which can be found under the Airbrush tab. You can adjust the size of the particles and the density of the spray, so it's pretty customizable! You can see it in use on the hand in the above image.

Since I don't typically make a new layer for every color (I always end up screwing them up and having to merge them anyway haha), I use the "Auto select" tool, which creates a selection based on whichever color you click. I then spray over it with Tone scraping. If you want to select the color wherever it appears on the canvas, you can turn off "Follow adjacent pixel." It works like this:

Also, if you need your selection to encompass more than one color, you can hold down your Shift key while you click another color and it will add it to your current selection.

I *think* that more or less covers it! I want to stress that none of this is the "correct" way to do things, it's just how I like to do things - I just want to put these tools out there so you can pick them up if they seem helpful. If you have any additional questions, feel free to leave them below and I'll see whether I can add that info here!