Learn How to Add Digital Colors!

Once you know about the color wheel, time to apply it and add digital colors to your black and white paintings with this digital painting tutorial!

To start off, there's a reason why drawings are done in monochrome first! This is because black and white drawings helps you look at light and shadows correctly without the worries of adding the proper colors.

Furthermore, most digital art programs will allow you to add colors later anyway, which is what you are going to do in this lesson!

As always, bring up your digital program of choice and let's get started!

1. Choosing the base

First, choose a picture that you have already done in grayscale. If you haven't gotten one, you can bring up a photograph. If the photograph is already in color, you can always change it to grayscale.

Of course, it wouldn't be as an effective learning tool if it's just a photograph because the colors are already there and you know which color is which. That is why your own digital black and white drawings are the best resources to learn from.

adding digital colors

I will use one grayscale drawing that I have done quickly to show you how to add digital colors.

Make sure that your grayscale picture has a nice blend of whites, blacks, and grays. Otherwise, the tool that we are going to use will not be as effective.

2. Using the brush tool settings

Regardless of which digital art program that you use, a good program will always have options to play with. Obviously, to add digital colors, you will be using the brush tool in your digital art program to paint these colors.

Rather than showing examples of all possible digital art programs, I will just reference the Photoshop brush tool for this demonstration. If you are not using Photoshop, that's still fine. From my experience, most programs will offer similar options.

Thus, I know that your digital art program will have the needed settings; albeit just different names and placements!

Anyway, the setting that you will need to put your brush tool is something called 'color' or 'hue.' With this setting, you can paint over the gray areas with the color you have selected in your palette.

Make sure the lock transparency setting is turned on! Otherwise, you'll color out of your layer's boundaries!

3. The coloring options

When you put your setting on 'color,' any color it comes in contact will change to that color. For example, regardless of the color value, or how light or dark the color is, it will change it to that color. That means dark gray will turn into dark red.

On the other hand, if you choose the setting on 'hue,' you will discover that it will only slightly enhance existing colors which match the color palette you have chosen. That is, it won't turn dark gray into dark red. Instead, it'll turn it into a dull red.

Moreover, hue won't work on pure grayscale colors. It needs to have a hint of color from the color spectrum for it to be useful.

adding digital colors

Due to this nature, you may need to paint with the 'color' option first and then switch it to the 'hue' setting to get the right colors needed for your digital paintings.

I usually switch between these two options when I add digital colors. For illustration purposes, I have used hue around the face and bust area while I used the color option for everything else.

4. Refining the process

Even after you know how to add digital colors in your art program, it is not a sure fire way to complete the digital painting.

This is why you need to use other tools and options to figure out what else can you do to the painting to make it stand out.

If necessary, use the dodge and burn tools in your digital art program to highlight or darken needed areas. The goal is to make the colors blend well with each other. Additional options you can try are the filter and layer settings.

adding digital colors

In this example, what I have done is duplicate my picture layer. Then, I went to the filters to make a universal blur. After that, I changed my layer to the overlay setting.

After that, I created a solid color and used the multiply color blending option on the layers. From there, I adjusted the opacity to get amazing color results.

However, you need not worry about this technique as it's usually specific to enhancing specific color hues and values.

When you want to dull colors, there are other techniques you can use. In the end, there are no universal techniques.

You choose what's right for your digital painting as you feel your way through a composition.

Up to this point, we have covered most of the basics from knowing the right digital tools, to simple perspective, to drawing light and shadows, and to learn how to add digital colors.

These will be your foundation to build on. So keep up that motivation to learn more!