Painting Technique - Monkey Cover #4

The next step in the process is painting the final artwork. For this book I'm going to start each illo by doing an underpainting. If you are wondering what an underpainting is, I'll show you next time. But before I start into the final work I like to do a color thumbnail. I take a low res version of the pencil drawing and quickly color it in using Photoshop (see above.) I save these color studies to use as reference as I work on the final. Sometimes I end up changing the colors in the end but at least I have a guide.

One of the great things about working digitally is that I never have to worry about running out of a paint color or forgetting what color I used. I can just open up this color study file use the eye dropper and viola! more paint.