- [Aaron] In this tutorial,
I'll show you one of the fastest
and most efficient ways to color line art.
That's coming up next.
(light music)
Thanks for joining me today.
I'm digital artist, Aaron Rutten
and it is my mission to help artists like you
enjoy digital art and learn some new skills along the way.
That's why today I'm going to be showing you a quick
and easy way to color your line art using Krita.
Krita 4.0 has a new feature called Colorize Mask.
Essentially, it'll let you make marks in the image
and then an algorithm will detect where the lines are
and it will automatically fill within those lines.
On top of that, you can easily edit the colors and the fills
and you have a lot more control
than you'd have using the Paint Bucket.
So let's go ahead and take a look at how to do this.
I have this drawing that I made of Goku from Dragon Ball Z.
If you're interested in learning how to draw this,
I have a tutorial that I'll link to
in the description of this video.
If you watched that tutorial,
you can see how tedious it can be to color line art.
So let's take a look at how to do it
the easy way here in Krita.
What you'll need is your line art
to be on a separate layer from the background,
so by that I mean there isn't white
in between my black lines here.
So just make sure when you're drawing,
you're drawing your lines on a separate layer.
So I have my black lines separate from my white background.
With that lines layer selected,
I'll just go to the Colorize Mask Edit tool,
here in the toolbar.
And then all I need to do is just click on my line art,
and all of a sudden it gets kind of blurry and kind of fuzzy.
You'll also notice over in the Layers palette,
there's a Colorize Mask layer now
and it's attached to the 'lines' layer.
We can lock the mask if we don't want to be able to edit it.
We can show and hide the effects of the mask.
So if you're not seeing this blurriness,
you'll need to click on this little icon here.
And then we can of course reset it as well.
We can also access some of these controls
within the Tool Options panel.
If you're not seeing that,
then you want to go to Settings > Dockers > Tool Options.
And as long as the Color Mask editing tool is selected,
you'll see these options here.
So if we turn Edit Key Strokes on and off,
that is the same as using this icon here.
The rest of these options we'll come back to in a minute.
Essentially, all we need to do now
is we need to select the colors that we want,
so Goku's pants are kind of a red orange color like this.
So what we do is we just paint a couple of strokes here,
we'll paint a couple here.
You don't need to fill in everything
as if you're going to color it in,
you just need to place some paint
and just imagine that this paint will expand automatically
and it'll go automatically to the edges.
So if there's any closed shapes in your line art
such as on the knee here, you'll want to make sure
that you get your paint in there.
Let's go ahead and choose the next color,
let's choose kind of a bluish color like this.
We'll use this for the armbands and the undershirt
and the belt and the boots.
And we want to make sure that we keep it only
on the part that we want to be blue.
We'll switch to a yellow color now
for the trim on the boots.
Just put a little paint in each of these areas
but make sure not to go outside the line.
Let's go ahead and switch to a flesh color now.
We'll put in some little hints of that on the face here.
We want to make sure you get in between the hair
and on the ears as well, do some on the neck,
and on the arms, the hands.
And then we'll want to have some white for the eyes
so we'll select white, put in a little white here.
The hair has a little bit of a gray highlight,
so we'll add some of that.
And then we also need to define the areas
that are transparent.
So we can pick any color.
Let's just pick a nice bright color
that we're not going to use in our piece like this pink here.
And I just want to designate that the background
and in between the arms here,
these areas do not have any color, they'll be transparent.
We need to click on that swatch here.
If you're not seeing all these options,
just to go ahead and expand your palette
by dragging the bottom down.
And these swatches are representing the colors
that we've marked in our piece here.
We'll click on the pink one that we want to be transparent
and we'll click the Transparent button,
that puts a little slash through it,
and now we know that pink will represent transparency.
So now we can test our results,
we'll click the Update button,
give it a minute to update.
If this is really large artwork, it'll take a lot longer.
And then once it looks like it's done something,
you can see it's kind of expanded the paint.
We'll go ahead and click on Edit Key Strokes
to turn those off.
And you can see it's done a pretty darn good job
of filling in Goku.
It's not absolutely perfect,
you can see on the eye, that needs a little bit of work
but we can clean that up a bit.
Here on the boots, I forgot to add the red areas
on these bows but that's okay
because I can edit this effect at any time.
I'll turn Edit Key Strokes back on.
I'll go ahead and select a red color here.
And I'll paint in some red on this bow.
We'll click on Update and then we'll hide the Key Strokes.
You can see that fixed the bow for the most part,
there's a little bit of yellow missing on the toe there.
So I'll go ahead and put my Key Strokes back on,
just select that yellow swatch,
paint in here with a little bit of yellow, update again.
Now if you want this to update a bit faster,
you can check this Limit to Layer Bounds box.
Let's click on Update and that should make it perform
a little bit faster.
Let's turn off our Key Strokes and you can see now
that it filled in that little gap on the boot.
It did spill over a little bit
and so that's why you have a little bit of control here
with Edge Detection, Gap Close, and Clean Up.
You can play with these settings
to see the kind of results that you get.
Edge Detection, when you turn it on,
is going to detect the edges.
If your image has any large solid areas,
this will really help a lot.
You can also help it decide whether or not
it's going to close a gap.
And what I mean by a gap is for example,
here in the eye there's a gap in the line,
so the algorithm doesn't know exactly
where I want the white to begin and the skin to end.
So you'd play with this in Gap close,
you might be able to get some better results in that regard.
Clean Up Strokes can eliminate any paint
that's spilling outside of the edges.
So I could try turning that up a bit
and then updating, we'll see if it gets
that little spot on the foot.
Not quite, let's turn it up a little bit more.
Still didn't get it, so what it could be is
that I need to edit my Key Strokes.
And I can see that I've actually painted
a little bit over the edge there.
So I can just switch to my Eraser
and I can just erase a bit of that yellow,
and I'll go ahead and update again, hide my Key Strokes,
and now that little bit of spillover is gone.
Clean up that little red spot on the foot as well.
And I'd say that's done a pretty good job.
Now of course these are just my flat colors
so I'd want to add more levels of color
to this to build up the form.
I'd also want to clean up the eye a little bit.
The first thing that I'll do
is I'll go ahead and go to File and then Save As,
and I want to make sure that I'm saving this
as a Krita document,
and I'll just call this goku-lines-color.
As long as I'm saving in the Krita format,
I'll be able to save my Colorize Mask
and that Colorize Mask will be editable.
So if you might want to go in and edit your colors later,
I would recommend saving a copy
that has your Colorize Masks still active.
Let's go ahead and save another copy.
We'll go to File, Save As,
and I'll just call this color-flat.
The reason why is because we're going
to right-click on the Colorize Mask.
We're going to choose Convert to Paint Layer,
that makes it no longer editable as a Colorize Mask,
however it has turned all those color layers
into actual paint layers.
But the colors are all on the same layer,
so what we need to do now is
we need to go to Layer > Split > Split Layer.
You don't need to change any of these settings here,
just click on Apply and now it's magically taken
all of our colors and separated them all
into their own individual layers
and it's even given them descriptive names
of what the color is on that layer.
Now that is a huge time-saver
because otherwise you'd have to go
and label all these layers yourself and separate them
and this is just great.
This is so much more efficient than using the Paint Bucket
or even hand coloring your artwork.
And then of course I could go to that white layer,
and if I wanted to clean up the eye a little bit,
I could do that.
However one thing it has done
is it's turned on Transparency (or Alpha) Lock.
So that means that I'll be able to paint inside
of that color, but I won't be able to paint outside of it.
And most of the time, you're going to want that on,
so that's a good thing.
But for the eyes here, it's not.
So we'll want to make sure that we turn off the Alpha Lock,
we select White and then we can go in here
and we can paint in that missing area on the eyes,
so you have to do a small amount of cleanup
but honestly if we'd have done this any other way,
it would have taken a lot longer.
So now I can go ahead
and turn that Transparency lock back on.
I can go to that orange-red layer for example.
I can hold Ctrl and I can sample that color,
could make it a bit darker.
And if I wanted to,
I could add some shading here to my pants.
And I don't have to worry about painting outside
of the 'pants' layer because I have the transparency locked.
I could also go to the skin layer
which is called Apricot here,
hold Ctrl and sample that color
and make it a bit brighter,
and I could put in some highlights here on the arms.
Now I'm not going to go into detail
about how to color this beyond this point.
You can watch the coloring segment of my Goku video
to learn how to do that.
Now one thing I do want to point out
is the Colorize Mask layer is also still here
but as I mentioned earlier, even if we go back
to our tool here, it's not editable.
So unless you want to keep this layer,
you could actually just delete it.
Now the last thing I want to mention
is that this Colorize Mask tool
will work on groups of layers,
so if you have a bunch of different groups of line art,
all you need to do is select the group, right-click on it,
and then you would choose
Add Colorize Mask to that group.
This can make it really quick to fill-in backgrounds
that have a bunch of different line art layers.
So there you go.
That's a fast and efficient way to color your line art
using the Colorize Mask tool in Krita.
If you found this information helpful,
make sure to subscribe to my channel.
I have a lot more digital art videos like this.
And join me on my mission
to create more free digital art resources
at patreon.com/AaronRutten.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.