The key to producing great digital painting is TIME. Most people who are new to Adobe Photoshop will stop after the first round of applying colour to their illustration. By building up separate layers of colour, the “beginner” art will begin to look more spectacular. The main power of doing your colour work, or any work for that matter, in separate layers is you can control virtually every aspect of the final look. With some experimenting you can get some interesting and sometimes unexpectedly great results.

For this tutorial I will be colouring one of my monster illustrations. The picture started out as a pencil sketch that I scanned in. You can check out my tutorial (Pencil Sketch to Smooth Digital Shading) on how I got the picture to this stage HERE. Because this picture already has the shading done you can really concentrate on just colouring.

If you would like to follow along with this tutorial using my original full sized picture then CLICK HERE to download the image (480KB). Be patient as it opens in another window. Once it is open, right-click on the image and select "Save Image As..." to save it to your computer.

There are one hundred and one different ways to colour art in Photoshop, what follows is the way I do it. If you are interested in becoming a digital artist this tutorial will give you an insight into my technique.

I suggest you read through the entire tutorial before you begin. Let's get started...

Step 1. The Layer Set Up For My Digital Art

Open your image in Photoshop and duplicate the layer. I named this new layer "Shaded". You can now delete the original locked layer.

Change the mode for this layer to MULTIPLY.

Create a new layer beneath the "Shaded" layer. I named this layer "Solid".
Using a hard brush block out the shape of the creature on this layer. I change the size of the brush depending on detail. Make sure you zoom in when on the edges of creature. (You could use the pen tool instead if you were so inclined and then fill the path). You can see that I used grey but the colour doesn't matter...this layer will soon have it's visibilty turned off.

Now we have a clear outline of the creature.

Next I create another new layer. Using the gradient tool I fill this layer to get a basic colour (and light) scheme going. This also gets rid of the overall white of the image. The darker colour is 4E4741 at the top and the lighter shade is BBAB94, in case you are following along at home.

This is the fast and easy set up done!
This time spent organising now is going to save you a lot of time in the next stage (which is the fun stage) Step 2. Adding the Colour > >