Add Color To Line Art Quickly & Easily In Inkscape

in today's zinscape lesson we'll learn how to quickly and easily add color to line art with the paint bucket tool [Music] [Music] we can actually do this with line art that we create in the Escape as we'll see later in the video but because it's easier to draw a line art either in painting software like Photoshop or by hand first then scanning it into the computer we'll first take a look at how to fill in line art from an imported image first to import an image we can click this button up here the image hour uses as one of a kid who appears to be holding a very large carrot I provided a link to this image in the description below in case you want to use the same one to follow along but feel free to use your own line art image if you want okay to import it we can double click it then click OK here alright so the first thing we want to do is get rid of the white background this is because we're going to put the line art and the colors on separate layers with the line art always on top I want to be able to see the colors underneath to do this we need to convert the line art into pads using the trace bitmap dialog to open the trace bitmap dialog we can right click the image and choose Trace bitmap as we can see in the preview down here the default settings actually do a really good job with this image if you're using a different image you might need to adjust the threshold setting up here a bit but as long as you stick with black lines on a white background you shouldn't have much of an issue okay we can go ahead and click apply down here and wait for it to finish and now we have a vectorized version of the line art with the background removed the main thing we want to look for in our line art now is that we don't have any gaps in the lines for any areas we want to fill in that's because the paint bucket tool will only fill in areas that are completely enclosed all of the lines in here look great but if we deselect it we can see that the areas at the borders are not fully closed in to fix this we're going to need to put a border around the lines to do this easily we can undo with Ctrl Z to put it back in line with the image turn on snapping with this button up here go to the pin tool snap to this corner of the image up here then this one down here then over here then up here and click the first Point again to close it off and we can make the stroke thicker by right clicking the stroke width value down here and choosing something higher like four now we can go to the select tool and select the image by clicking in the background area and delete it we can see that all of the areas of our line art are now fully enclosed so they're ready to be filled in with color we can go ahead and close out the trace bitmap dialog now and turn off snapping next we want to create a separate layer for the colors and we want to put it underneath the line art layer so that the line Art stays on top let's first rename our current layer by going to layer rename layer giving it a name like line art by pressing rename then we can go to layer add layer name is something like colors choose below current for the position and click add now our currently selected area as the colors layer as we can see down here so we can switch the paint bucket tool here and start coloring in our line art okay so the way the paint bucket tool works is when we click in an enclosed area like the cloud here it creates A New Path in the area by using the color of the tool to fill in the screen pixel that we clicked then it fills in all the surrounding pixels until it reaches pixels that don't match the click to pixel this includes the pixels of the line art but due to anti-aliasing if we zoom in on the cloud by putting your cursor there holding control and scrolling up the mouse wheel you can see that the pixel is close to the lines don't get filled and actually because the tool goes by screen pixels when we're zoomed in like this we can get a more accurate result so if we undo with Ctrl Z and click the area now the color gets closer to the lines it's never going to be perfect though fortunately however we have this gross shrink by setting up here after the tool creates the New Path it grows or shrinks the path by whatever value we put in here negative numbers will shrink it and positive numbers will grow it so if I undo and set this to negative 1 for example then click the area the path shrinks by one millimeter which is what my units are currently set to if I undo again and set it to positive one it grows by one millimeter if I zoom in more there's still a tiny bit of the area that didn't get filled so I can zoom back out and to pan here I'm holding down the mouse wheel and moving the mouse then I can undo again set this to something a little bit higher like two and click the area now it's pretty much perfect depending on the image you use and your zoom level we might have to try a smaller or larger number we mainly just don't want to make it so large that the color starts to go outside the lines also the reason we're doing the color on a layer that is underneath the line art is that otherwise the color will be overlapping the lines right now okay now to change the color of the paint bucket tool we can click a color in the color palette however one important thing to know about the tool is that after it creates A New Path it automatically selects that path so if we click for example white down here not only does it change the color of the tool as we can see by our cursor and at the top right here but also changes the color of the selected path and now because the tool color is white we can go ahead and fill in any other areas that we want to be white like the other cloud and maybe the front of the house actually if we zoom in here on the front of the house you can see this tiny area here that is bucked off from the large area of the front we probably want the small area to always be the same color as the large area but if we fill in the small area right now then decide later that we want to change the color of the front of the house which I'll do by going to the select tool selecting the big path here and choosing a different color it of course doesn't fill on the small path because these paths are separate however if we go back to the paint bucket tool and undo a few times so that both areas are no longer filled we can fill in the big area then we'll shift and fill in the small area holding shift will make the tool perform the union path operation between the New Path and the selected path so these two are now actually parts of the same path and changing the color of one will change the color of the other similarly we can fill in part of the sky change the color then hold shift and fill in the other parts of the sky including these tiny areas over here now we can change the color of all parts at once we can actually also further refine the color with the fill and stroke dialog by opening it with this button up here then adjusting the color okay let's go ahead and use all that we learned to fill in the rest of the drawing if you want to make the color of an area the same as another area we can click this eyedropper button at the bottom of the fill and stroke dialog then click the area with the color we want okay now let's say we want to change the color of this little piece of grass sticking out of the ground here because it's not enclosed it got filled in with the ground color to change the color we need to switch the pin tool and create a path that will enclose the area like this now we can go back to the paint bucket tool and fill the area then make it whatever color we want we also still have the little path we created here but it's being covered by the Green Path if we want to delete it we can go to the select tool hold alts and click in here to select the path and press delete I also see that the tool missed some tiny areas here on the ground so I can select this path here go to the paint bucket tool hold shift and click the small areas to add them to the path as you can see if we use the color of the selected path which is pretty convenient all right so that's how we can add color to an imported linear image as I mentioned at the beginning of the video we can also do this with paths we create an inkscape first we want to go back to the line art layer to do this we can open the layers and objects dialog by going to layer layers and objects then choose the line art layer in the list here and by the way here's what it would look like if we hide the line art kind of strange but also kind of cool but anyway I'll show the line art again now we can go to the pin or pencil tool and create a random sketch of something then we can select all the pads and increase the stroke width go back to the colors layer switch to the paint bucket tool and start filling in the sketch with color actually I'll undo that then zoom in some to get a better result okay that should do it for this lesson I encourage you to try this out with other images as well as with line art you've created an inkscape or other software thank you for watching and I'll see in the next lesson

Channel: Sweater Cat Designs

Views: 18,814

Keywords: graphic design, vector, digital art, vegetable, coloring book, print, Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Affinity Designer

Id: sH3HiKziPso

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 25 2022