Tutorial: Digitally Coloring an Inking

It can be frustrating if you have a comic - particularly a webcomic - that you wish to ink and color, yet have no clue how to keep your inks clean or your colors defined. This can be made all the more infuriating if everyone simply exclaims, "Oh, it's easy!" without explaining how to do it. Worse, they simply assume you must know - the typical "if you have to ask, you'll never know" mentality.

I have covered digital inking in this tutorial for the sake of thoroughness, but the sole purpose of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to clean up and digitally color a manually inked drawing (which, for the sake of this tutorial, I assume is a comic or illustration). In this tutorial, I will cover favored software for creating and modifying digital artwork, how to digitally clean up an image that has been inked by hand and scanned, how to set up a manually inked image so that it can be easily digitally colored, options for digitally inking artwork if that is the route that you decide to take, and a few notes on file corruption and the proper selection of RGB vs CYMK mode.

There's a lot of software out there for the production of digital artwork. It changes regularly, which can be frustrating and confusing - but them's the breaks. Thankfully, most of this software shares a few standard operations, and these tend to remain from version to version, although your method of accessing them may change.