People who have messy lineart... how do you make base colouring less of a pain

[smokesalty]

I keep getting recommended brushes like the close and fill and stuff like that but even with me adjusting gap tolerance my lineart has enough gaps to make it a pain in the ass.

I mainly just have to close gaps myself and magic want tool an area, lasso tool over some areas and fill with the bucket but like I HATE IT. I hate that there are gaps I have to fix constantly

It's the only part of the process I don't like because it's not creative like sketching and line art nor is it setting the mood like shading does. It's just placing down colours. I've paid friends to colour for me and it's great, if I could do that every week I would.

How do you make colouring somewhat fun?

[ShidoDraws]

I love coloring and I don't even use any kind of fill tools. I just use a pen brush and color it like I'm coloring a coloring book. The coloring stage actually takes shorter time for me than the lining stage. Also, my favorite part about coloring is I get to choose where I want the color dodge to be on my drawing, like if I want my character to look like they were acting in a korean drama with those beautiful filters or if they are in a horror movie in the dark with a source of light coming from a distance or coming from themselves.

Maybe I just like making my drawings look cinematic.

[TheLemmaLlama]

I also do it with a brush instead of using fill tools, though I do use big brushes to cover large surfaces quickly so it's not really a 'colouring book' experience.

It's not a pain for me because ... I have messy colouring as well XD

(That probably wasn't very helpful :P)

Also, my favorite part about coloring is I get to choose where I want the color dodge to be on my drawing, like if I want my character to look like they were acting in a korean drama with those beautiful filters or if they are in a horror movie in the dark with a source of light coming from a distance or coming from themselves.

Maybe I just like making my drawings look cinematic.

Yes, I love immersive, cinematic scenes and bold, dramatic lighting! That might be part of why I find colouring the least pain-in-the-ass part of drawing XD

[DasIstWunderblyat]

There's gap recognition features in the app I use (surely there are similar things on other apps I don't), the downside is, you have to tap more. I also sometimes adjust the bucket settings.

Sometimes my line art is too sheer, that I often duplicated the layer that's it opaque enough for the sake of the bucket selection can see it as a line. Or, I duplicate it multiple times, merge some so they become opaque, change the color into background color, and merge them.

Also masking layer all the way when appropriate. It saves your life.

Though my coloring is shit and I'm sloppy

[EverydayWonderlander]

Usually, I go through on a first pass and close any gaps using my pen tool. Another tool I use (in CSP) is the lasso subtool under the "Figure" menu - that lets me go around the outer shape and fill it as soon as I pick up my stylus.
If I'm not feeling either of those, or if it's too sketchy for that to be worthwhile, I sometimes just duplicate the lines, change the colors, and hide the inner ones to put down a flat. There's still cleanup involved, but it gets the job done in a pinch.

Hooopefully that helps a little bit ?

[YS_og]

If you have CSP, this tool helped me a good bit

Eraser to remove only protrude pen and overflow - CLIP STUDIO ASSETS

[rajillustration]

This is actually why my current comic has very clean lineart--because filling color right now is a super pain in the ass if you have messier lineart. But, when I do have open areas of lineart, what I do is I add a new layer right before doing flats called "delete later" where I will just draw in all of the gaps so that way, when I fill, it uses that layer to reference as well as the line layers. (this does mean that in CSP you can't like use the reference layer tool, you just have to go with a "use all layers" option in the bucket) After I'm done flatting, I delete that layer, and it's as if it was never there.

[DokiDokiTsuna]

How do you make colouring somewhat fun?

This may not fit into most digital artists' workflow (especially for comics), but the one thing that makes base colors fun for me is...choosing them. ^^

I used to just use shading to set the mood, and pull the base colors straight from some pre-determined palette, but I found I started getting better-looking art when I made the base colors part of that process. They became a way to sort of practice and anticipate how I would shade later; they laid the groundwork for the mood and color grading of the scene.

But in general, when I have 'lineart' with a lot of gaps in it, I usually just start by making a base-color blob, like this:

Usually, the lines with the largest number of gaps are the long ones that form the outline of the drawing, so creating an outline of color ahead of time takes care of a lot of potential annoyances.
And after this is done, sometimes you find that you can use the paint bucket to fill in a lot of the inner spaces right away, and there're only a few left that you have to paint in yourself (although with real sketchy lines like this, it's better to just paint everything in, since there are so many 'false outlines'. But you can still use the paint bucket to give yourself a speed boost occasionally, or do some quick masking...in case it isn't obvious, I deal with this a lot). ^^

[Mallory]

I only figured this out yesterday so I haven't had time to tinker with this yet, AND this only works if you do cel shading on a separate layer.

But I figured out that doing shadows before flats will often close a lot of the gaps in your lineart/create shapes your fill bucket tool can follow - and since you had to draw those shadows anyways, you're not doing any extra work. You can then adjust the colors and shapes of the flats and the shadows accordingly when you're done. If you're in a fancy program that has features like "erase up to line" or something like that, you can just go ham on your shadows and use the erase tool after. Otherwise you might need to be a little neater near the lineart but IMO it's still way faster, because, again, you only need to be sorta neat once.

[system]

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