Adding Color to Your Digital Drawings

Hi there. I'm digital artist, Aaron Rutten. And I'd like to talk a little bit about coloring line art on your computer using a tablet. There's lots of different kinds of tablets. There's the smaller ones like the Wacom Intuos. And there are bigger ones like the Wacom Cintiq 24 HD Now drawing on a tablet is a lot like drawing on paper. I have my notebook here and I can go ahead and do a drawing. Let's say, we'll do this cactus character here. Just a little quick cartoon, I'm not gonna try to do anything too complicated. So... we have our little cartoon. We can do this the same way on a tablet We'll go ahead and draw. I'm using a program that's called Corel Painter X3. So you will need software to be able to do this, but there's lots of software out there. There's even free software that you can get. You can see I'm using my pen. It works just like the ink pen I was using. It has pen pressure, so I can press down lightly and get thin lines and I can press down firm and I can get thick lines I can even erase using the eraser that's on the end here to erase anything that I don't want. So let's add color to this cartoon here. We'll create a new Layer. And a Layer just allows us to put the color on top of the black. We'll set the Composite Method Multiply and we'll pick a green color that we want to use for our cactus here. And we'll just start coloring it in. And you'll see that I'm trying very hard to stay within the lines. But if I don't, that's okay because we can always go and we can erase some of that color. You can just fill it in real quick. Nice and easy. You don't have to worry about covering up the black. because the green is on a separate layer. Its tinting. And then, if you want, you can use your eraser to go in and erase anything that you don't want. I'm just going to do a quick job of this here. And then if we want to shade this cactus, we can of course do that. There's little trick here called "Preserve Transparency" that will allow us to only paint inside of this green area. It's kind of cool. And we'll paint with some green and you can see that I can really quickly shade this here. And I'll give this cactus person color for their mouth. So there you go. I hope that got you excited about creating digital art using a tablet. Check out my YouTube channel for Hundreds of free digital painting video tutorials