In The Beginning...

When I first came into ownership of Corel Painter X, I had no idea what I was doing. Sure, it was fun, but it was a whole different ball park compared to real painting. Which is a good thing. All I knew was that people were doing some fantastic art work with Corel, and I had trouble making a circle with my tablet.

This tutorial on how to colour is for intermediate users of Corel. When I say to use a blending tool, I'm not going to tell you exactly where it is. Being comfortable with Corel will help you a lot with this tutorial. A lot of this hub will be dependant on screenshots (which are displayed tiny, but click for a bigger image).

Below are the resources I began with (and while recommended, it's not that huge of a deal for you to have the exact same things).

1. Corel Painter X (any version will work, it's all the same concept)
2. Wacom Tablet (you can do it with the mouse, but whatever you yell at in the process, I'm not responsible for)
3. Scanned lineart to colour (so, I actually took a picture of mine... but if you're desperate for something to colour and feeling uninspired, I suggest googling colouring pages)

I will be using a picture of Belle, because my little sister loves Disney, and I feel she should be a little Christmas-y. Really, this tutorial will teach you techniques and tips that will hopefully be able to apply to any type of drawing you hope to do, and not just random colouring pages. Mind you, I am by far an inexperienced Corel user compared to some of the glorious paintings done on DeviantArt.

Step One -- Line Art

First we need lines to colour. If you're borrowing a colouring page from some very filthily rich animators, then you can skip this part. If you scanned in a drawing, this will be one of the most tedious steps of all... and it's not really that bad.

After lining you should have two layers, like the ones circled in red above. The canvas, which is your original scanned drawing, and the layer above it, which you should name lineart, with all your outline on it in that nice detailed way.

Helpful Hints: if you're having issues keeping your lines smooth, zoom in and do them that way. It may take a little longer to navigate, but it's easier to make your curves seem more natural. :)

Step Two -- Flat Colours

This is where we get to start planning our colours. There is something very important I'd like to note here: layers are your best friend. I say this because if you mess up and 'undo' no longer works, layers will save your sanity. If your computer can't handle too many layers, try to condense it into two or three. But layers will always help you.

Add a new layer and place it under lineart and above canvas. Colour it with a contrasting colour to what your drawing will be. If your drawing is mainly blues, colour it orange. This is temporary! It's to give you something to work against, and a colour won't stress your eyes as much as a white background will.

For Belle, after all the layering, I had ten layers: Canvas, BG, Lineart, Lips, Skin, Shirt, Eyes, White, Bow, Hair. The 'white' layer included her teeth, the shine in her eyes and the white part of her eyes.

How to select & colour flat parts: Click the magic wand and use it on the lineart layer to select as many places as you're going to colour. Hold shift to select multiple areas. For Belle's skin, I selected her face, her neck, and her arm. After you have the areas selected, create a new layer. I named mine 'Skin'. Next select the paint bucket tool. It's the little icon under the eraser. Pick the colour you want the areas selected to be (peach, in my case), and click in the lines. Make sure you're on the correct layer! Repeat until you have all your basic colours.

Not sure which colour to choose for your flat colouring? Imagine you have three shades for each area. A bright colour where the light hits, a middle colour, and the parts where shadows fall. The middle colour is what you're going to want to use as a flat shade. For example: Light blue - Blue - Dark blue.

Step Three -- Shading & Blending

Your new best friends: Dodge, burn, and soft blender. The Dodge/Burn tool is under the 'T' text on the side bar. I always start with shadows, because it's easier to plot those for me. You can start with highlights or shadows, whichever you prefer. Just remember to decide on a light source and stick with it! A lot of people forget to do that, and their paintings turn out jumbled.

Put in all the shadows and highlights that you want before doing a bit of blending with the soft blender. You can make the shading as heavy, or light, as you'd like, but remember that it's easier to start lightly and darken it as you go, seeing how the overall image looks.

Salty

For the glittery effects on her clothes, hair, and bow, I used the salty tool. It adds such a wonderful flair to girly-photos, or images with a 'touch of magic' in them. Used sparingly, and it can be rather fantastic. :)

Blush

You may have noticed I added an extra layer -- blush. I wanted to give her cheeks some colour that wasn't in the range of her skin tone. I made a new layer, put a little pink on it, and used the smudge tool to make it lighter. I also added a bit to her nose, but it's not as noticeable.

Eyes

Remember to dodge/burn the eyes too. It makes them seem more life-like and bright, like little marbles.

Border

I added a border and a design to the final image in adobe photoshop, another fantastic digital art program. Adding borders can give a classier look to your image and give it a more final flair.

Coloured Outline

Some people prefer to colour over their lines with a darker shade of the colour they outline, instead of using black. You can try it out (there's plenty of tutorials out there about this sort of stuff) and see if you like it. For my Belle painting, I preferred to use black lines, but who knows!

So that's my tutorial! This is how I colour, mind you, so feel free to experiment. Hopefully you learned something useful over this whole big thing. :) I know it's not the most exciting or thorough, but it's more than I was able to find when I was starting. Maybe it'll help some other beginners figure out what all those pretty shiny tools are for.

There's lots of material out there to read about how to use this program, and if you find any especially great ones, send me a note!

Belle (c) Disney

Drawing (c) Catawn