- [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.
