Tutorial for Challenge 19 - Digi Colouring with Felt Tips

Here is a tutorial to accompany this weeks challenge. There will be another tutorial published just after this one which uses a different medium to colour a digital image.

My equipment is very basic! These are the watercolour pencils (24) that I use and also the brush felt tips (30). I use the brush felt tips as the hard nibbed ones tend to 'scuff' the paper and are not as easy to blend with the different shades.

My two images that I'm colouring - Jack and Polly Polkadoodle from the Halloween download.

I've started off with Jack and the felt tips. By using a pale blue felt tip, I've coloured his jeans. This is now my base colour upon which I will add darker colours for shadowing.

I've then 'dotted' darker shades of blue on top of the initial block of colour - this is now providing shadows and form and it also helps to stop some of the hard lines that you get when using felt tips as they don't blend too well, but with this technique, its not quite as noticeable.

Once the jeans are completed I started on Jack's cape. Again, I added the lightest green I wanted as my base colour.

And slowly built up the shadows - the paler green stays as the highlights.

Once I'm happy with the cape, I then start on other smaller areas - I've coloured his t-shirt and started on his creepy gloves. Again, I've used the same techniques.

I've started to add different colours such as purple, blues and reds to build up more definition and to extend my colour range.

Next, the hair and mask is coloured.

And for extra highlights, I've used a white gel pen and loosely but carefully scribbled over the top of the felt tip where I want highlights. This provides more definition.

I had a little helper whilst I was colouring the two images - Samuel was on his school holidays and sat with me and coloured his own Halloween Jack with his felt tips! Even though I've enlarged the image to fit an A4 sheet, there is no loss of quality - so you can make the images as small or as large as you wish!

And this is the card I made with the image - I cut around Jack, leaving a fine white border and layered him onto papers from the Halloween download. A bit of inking and doodling and he is complete! Plus the wobbly eyed fimo spider, of course!

The second tutorial on digital image colouring follows this post. Hope you enjoyed this one, and go and re-discover felt tips (these were half price in Tesco's - £1.25!)