Digital Coloring - Tips for Beginners

I’ve had a few people lately asking me about coloring, where to start, tips for beginners, etc. So rather than answer them all individually I thought I’d write it out here and share it with you guys. So here it is, my beginners guide to getting started coloring:

Getting Started with Digital Coloring

Getting the Equipment:

1) Drawing Tablet.

If you're serious about doing digital coloring (even if it's just for fun or as a hobby) then the first thing I would recommend is getting a tablet. There are plenty of articles about choosing the right tablet for your needs. If you're just starting out, a relatively inexpensive tablet should be fine. Often times you can even find good quality second hand tablets that are like new. My first tablet was a used one I found on craigslist that was a fraction of the price you can buy it new and it lasted me for years. You can often find inexpensive ones on ebay as well. I currently use a wacom intuos4 but you wouldn't need to get a tablet that is that expensive to start out with unless you really wanted to.

2) Monitor color calibration system.

This is not a necessity for hobbyists, but for anyone who plans on going professional with their color work I highly recommend a color calibration system. I’m currently using Colordata Spyder 3 Express. I hear X-Rite also makes good color calibration software. Anyone serious about coloring, imo, will want to get some sort of color calibration. I, personally, try to calibrate at least once a month.

Getting the Study Material

I recommend watching and reading coloring tutorials. Just find and watch as many tutorials by good artists that you can. Many tutorials can be found here on DA, on YouTube, and via Google search. You can usually tell pretty quickly if the tutorial is done by an artist that you find is qualified to teach you. If their art is pretty amateur I would probably skip the tutorial and move on to tutorials done by more skilled artists. Usually more skilled artists have been doing it longer and can often give better advice and have usually learned good techniques and “tips and tricks” that can help you in the long run.

    1)      Video tutorials (which can be found via youtube, deviantart, and google)

    2)      Text tutorials (which can be found via deviantart and google)

    3)      Art books on color theory and digital (or traditional) painting (many art books can be downloaded free online via google searches)

    4)      Art books on comic coloring (a great one that I would recommend for ANYONE wanting to learn to color professionally is “Hi-Fi Color for Comics” by Brian Miller)

Getting the Inspiration

    1)      Follow artist that inspire you, artists that you want to learn from, artists that create art like the type of art that you want to create.

    2)      Find art works that inspire you and start a collection (DA makes it easy to create folders in your faves so you can separate your study material). You can even separate them into art where the technique is solid and inspires you. Art where the color palettes chosen are inspiring to you. Art where the lighting is inspiring. All of this can be brought into their own folders for study. By staying organized you can better access your study materials.

Getting the Images

    1)      Practice coloring with images that inspire you. Find images that you look at and immediately you desire to color it. Now that doesn’t mean you can color just any image you see, you need to make sure that the artist (or artists, if it’s inked and drawn by two different people) are ok with people coloring their images. Some great places to find images that are colorable are ComicTeamUp, color-me-club, Flats-for-Colorists, Free-Lineart-User, Give-Me-Color, and DA has several more coloring clubs. Practicing coloring is so much more pleasurable when you're doing it with an image you really like, and you're also likely to spend more time on it and give it your best work - so choose images that you really really like. With so many great images to pick from in so many great coloring groups there is no reason to color something for practice that you don't really like. 

 2)      Find images that are high quality. I recommend starting with line art and ink work that is high in quality, as that will usually produce the best overall outcome. As a colorist it’s harder to produce good quality images if you start out with low quality art. The better the art is before you start the easier it is to create color work that you can be proud of.

 3)      Start a collection. Just as with the collection of your study materials, it’s good to start collecting some of the art that you wish to color. This will make it much easier for you when you have the time to color or when the desire to color hits you. The worse thing is having the real desire to color but by the time you are done searching for an image that you want to color you’ve lost a lot of time and sometimes even the desire to color. Having a folder or two dedicated to the images you want to color will help you save time in finding your coloring practice images later.

After that it’s just practice - like anything in life the more you do it the better you get at it.

I hope that helps some of you guys and I hope that answers some of your questions. Feel free to ask me questions any time. Sometimes I might get busy but I always try to answer questions when I can. I’m not a super professional or anything or a really awesome colorist but I am happy to pass on what works for me in my current skill level.

Happy Coloring!

~Stacy Raven