Digitally colouring some ink drawings

I’ve been getting back into working in ink recently, as well as trying to better archive my work digitally by scanning pieces in, and generally trying to better organise my art folders on my computer.

In scanning in and editing my ink drawings, I was adjusting the levels so I could select just the ink lines, and get a crisper, cleaner digital records of these drawings. By doing this, I ended up being able to save a transparent version of these drawings, and started thinking about how I could maybe use this to do some digital colouring to these drawings.

I like a lot of digital art that I come across and have a lot of respect for the artists making it, and although I do every now and then work digitally myself, I struggle to feel like I’ve fully found my own style in this medium. Some of this I think is maybe a romanticisation of traditionally art materials and process, which I just don’t get from digital art. The feeling of pencil or pen on paper just feels right to me, where stylus on glass is still unfamiliar.

But I do always want to explore other mediums, and digital seems so versatile, so it is something I am really trying to find a way to fit it into my practice.

Now obviously digitally colouring traditional art isn’t anything new, and I’ve seen other people doing this online for a long time, but whilst I tried making purely digital art, I’ve never tried this sort of hybrid process before.

I also worked with a mouse on my computer, as opposed to a stylus on a drawing tablet. This was pretty refreshing, because instead of noticing how the feeling of a digital stylus felt just slightly off, I was already used to the feeling of using a mouse to interact with a computer. I think there is a tendency to see working on digital drawing with a mouse instead of a drawing tablet as a limitation, and maybe it is, it definitely doesn’t give the same range of motion as a pen or pencil would.

But for the purpose of colouring, and particularly the kind of colouring I wanted to do, a mouse actually felt like the better tool. I was using the polygonal lasso tool to select the areas that I wanted to fill with colour, which let me be precise in my selection, but still felt like it had a bit of imperfection to it. I was purposefully letting some of the selection fall outside the lines of the original drawings, and the results I got, to me, looks almost like block printing, which I love.

I think I am going to get on with a bit of traditional colouring, maybe in coloured pencils next, but I will definitely be doing some more digital colouring in the future. I think I would like to see if I can create transparent scans of pencil drawings, and see what digitally coloured versions of these would look like.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, see you next time, Ed :-)