So, for the longest time I've only ever done traditional art. I've begun to use my resources at school to try and get into digital. There I have a tablet, photoshop, and a scanner. So, my question is, any advice for coloring and whatnot?
Personally, I have a layer of a sketch with a lowered opacity, a new layer for line art to go over the sketch, then for color, I hide the layer of sketch and use the magic wand select tool and hold shift which allows me to select multiple parts of the drawing. Then I do clean up with shift + lasso tool and use the color block tool to fill in all of those spaces at once. Then repeat until done. This I where I usually screw up royally so I suggest watching tutorials on shading because I don't know how to do it right. Once done take a lower opacity brush in black, make a new layer and start to add shading.
I'll start with the good old "play with all the buttons! You might discover some neat ways to colour your art!" I actually really recommending watching speedpainting on YouTube. Only because lots of people have different ways of doing it, and through trial and error most people find a way they prefer to do it. I certainly had a particular way of colouring but after studying a few different methods I've been experimenting and getting some good results. Sometimes the experiments work, sometimes they look awful but it's still practice and will always help in bettering you as an artist
Congrats on your transition! This sounds exactly like me when I used to do nothing but traditional. It was very awkward starting off with the tablet since it oriented my eyes towards a different area. Anyways, for whichever program you use, whether it be Photoshop CC, Clip Studio Paint Pro, or Paint Tool SAI, it's definitely important to learn the program itself. It would serve as a great tool to know your capabilities within the program. In its most basic form, you should simply practice alot with your new tablet. Do a sketch every single day. It's going to be tough at first, so it's important you get used to the tablet as soon as you can. As for coloring, this would mostly depend on your lineart style. Is your lineart thick or thin? If it's thick, it should be easy enough to select everything within with a Magic Wand tool, expand the selection so it goes underneath the lines, then fill it in with a new layer underneath the lineart (Layers are SUPER important so make sure you learn about those). If your lines are thin, it will require more patience. You may have to manually fill it in rather than using a Magic Wand tool. You could outline the lineart with the color you desire, then select the portion within the color outline you just made, expand the selection, pick a huge brush, then just sweep over it. It's a lot faster than just filling it in as if you were doing traditional. Oh, and learn about locking transparent pixels. That is very important too.
I could spend hours listing things about digital art but since people often don't pursue it that far it would be an overwhelming and not so helpful thing at this stage. Small and simple things I could recommend include: - using the tablet even when you aren't drawing, it's essential that you get as many hours, preferably hundreds, of time spent with the recalibration of your eyes to your to your screen (unless of course its a cintiq tablet but that seems unlikely?). Use it to browse facebook or this forum or whatever, use it to play videos games, do everything with it, because the co-ordination is still built whether you are drawing or not. - follow some tutorials outside the area of drawing necessarily, drawing tutorials don't really target initiating you into the program itself, whereas something like photomanipulation tutorials get you working in all the areas of the program and you therefore develop an appreciation of what you can do with each thing. Once you have that familiarity of what does what, you can then separate the concern of trying to create from how to create it.
Thank you~ I've recently been trying to decide my future in game design, currently looking into game art, studying texturing at the moment~