6 TIPS TO COLOR ART FASTER | ways to color your art quicker

Hey guys! So today I'm going to share some of my absolute favorite tips for coloring your art faster. So if you feel like it takes you hours to finish a painting or if you just move at a snail's pace, hopefully these tips will really help you. So yeah, let's get to it! So my first tip for you is to use the lasso tool. So you can use this in Photoshop or Procreate. Once I started incorporating this into my workflow while I was painting, I found that it really sped up the process. So on Procreate, you can select the color fill option and then as you're like just adding in your base colors, it'll just automatically fill in that entire selection. So especially with hair, I find this like really helps speed up the process. If I have like little strands of hair that I want to add, I can just like lasso, use the lasso tool and just like fill it in really quickly. I use this too whenever I am adding shadows and highlights and yeah, it makes it a lot faster. I will say that one thing with lasso tool is I feel like sometimes the edges are pretty rough, especially if you're going quickly with the lasso tool. So if you find that that's, if you like run into that problem, what I tend to do is just leave them like rough whenever you're just getting in, like getting down your base colors and then later whenever you're doing the rendering phase, you can sort of clean up those edges. So that sort of brings me to my next tip, which is whenever you're in the rendering stage, focus a lot of your energy on the focal point or like where you want the viewer to look and kind of leave out the rest. Like let me sort of explain. So I used to have the same level of detail around the entire painting when I was first getting into digital art and what I realized from studying other artists is that they would have a lot more detail and like paint strokes and just like a lot more effort was put into certain areas of the focal point. So like usually it's the face and then they would have less detail in other areas. And so this will really save you time because you're not having to spend four hours, you know, detailing the entire painting. Instead, if you just focus, like spend a little bit of time on the main area, usually the face or the hands or, you know, those kinds of areas and you don't spend a lot of time in other areas. Not only does it help you save on time, but it also helps emphasize your focal point. So which is what you want. Like you, it helps make your painting more dynamic whenever you have a lot of detail in one area and then less detail in other areas. This is something I feel like a lot of beginner artists don't really realize. I know I didn't realize it when I first started. Everything doesn't have to be super detailed. You don't have to spend hours in every single area. I'll give you like an example on screen. So for this painting, I put a lot more detail on the character's face, which you can see. And you can see it has all these bright colors and things, but there's a lot more shapes and paint strokes and all of these things in the face. And then if I go down to like the bottom of the painting, you can see there's not a lot of detail. Like there's not, it's basically still in the sort of rough stages, but it doesn't really look like it. When you look at the painting as a whole, you don't really notice it. It just helps to emphasize that this is where I want you to look in the face. And my next tip is to use textured brushes. So I think textured brushes are a great way to cut down on all of your time spent coloring. I see this in a lot of artist's work. Sam does arts, for example. If you look at some of his paintings, in the backgrounds especially, you'll see it looks like a super detailed background. But if you like zoom in, you can see that a lot of the times it's either just scribbles or textured brushes. Like there's not a lot of actual detail there, but it makes it look like it because you use things like texture. And texture just immediately adds like this sort of noise to the painting that makes our brain sort of think that, oh, like those are bushes or you know whatever, when really it's just like a couple of paint strokes. And this is really helpful for saving you on time because especially with backgrounds, like you're not having to, you know, painstakingly paint every single leaf in the background. Like you can just find some texture textured brushes and just paint them in very quickly. You can find actual like literal like leaf brushes, but you can also just find like sort of blobby textured brushes that sort of give that look. Some of this is trial and error a lot of the time. Once you sort of figure out what textured brushes can give a certain look, then it really helps you cut down on your coloring time for your painting. And it doesn't just have to, I know I talked about the background just because that's like an easy example, but it doesn't just have to be the background. You can find it in, you can use textured brushes in portraits. There's faces and their clothes and their hair and still get that sort of like quicker effect. I do also want to mention, and this kind of goes with the textured brushes, I feel like doing speed paints and time studies will really help you cut down on how long it takes you to color. Because when you set, when you give yourself a time limit of like recreating a another photo, reference photo, or just even from painting in your imagination, you're really forcing yourself to figure out ways to simplify things really quickly because you're giving yourself a limited time to get it done. So you know if you're painting a plant for example, you know and you've only got like 10 minutes to paint this sucker, like you're not going to spend a long time trying to like paint all the tiny little details. You're going to figure out you know, oh I can use you know this textured brush to sort of get that highlight glow so that you know you can get the gist of it quickly. Then the more you do these, the more that you can start implementing those sort of tricks and things in your workflow. I do feel like long term, I think speed paints and just time to studies will really help. Another tip I have for you is to use layer modes. So this again, this is available in Photoshop or Procreate. I do have a tutorial on using layer modes for Procreate which I will link somewhere up here in the in the video that you can check out if you need to. Specifically for me, I use the multiply and overlay layers a lot. So multiply and overlay layers sort of work to blend in with the colors underneath them and this just helps. So like whenever you're doing shadows for example, instead of having to find each individual color of shadow for like your entire painting, you can just pick one color, set it to a multiply layer, and then color all of your shadows on one layer. This saves a ton of time. I know layer modes are a little bit intimidating, especially if you're new to digital art, but if you can sort of learn to use those and start using them in your workflow, it'll cut down on your paint time tremendously. And then my last tip for you is to work from big to small. This is something that I still struggle with sometimes to be honest. It's really tempting to go in and add all of these tiny little details that you're excited about in your painting like while you're doing it, and the problem with it is though is sometimes if you feel like you need to change something or you aren't happy with the color or just anything like you want to make any sort of changes, if you go in with details first and all of these small tiny things like details first, then whenever you want to make these changes, you're going to have to paint over all of those details that you added. And that sucks because you basically wasted that time because you put those details too early. A big one is highlights. Like I love to add highlights really early, but it doesn't always make sense because if I make changes later that I'm having to paint over all the highlights that I already added. So this is like a very simple step in the workflow that you can change. So if you just think if I just start with the base colors in big shapes, I look at all of the big shadows and the big highlights, and then I can move into these smaller shadows and the smaller highlights. And like just thinking that versus oh I'm going to add all of these tiny little details right now because again if you change your mind or you change something later in the painting, you're just wasting that time. I do this all the time and it sucks. Like I know I knew I shouldn't have done it, but I do it anyway. If you can like get yourself to not do that all the time, if you can try to think from big to small, it'll really help with your workflow and it'll save you time while you're painting. If you want a super simple like method of coloring your art that's really quick and easy, I do have a video of that which you can check out that video again somewhere up here. So other than that, don't forget to like and subscribe and I will see you in the next one. Bye!