No, I’m not talking about Halloween! I’m talking about bringing our drawings to life with colour. Having done all our inking I’ve scanned them all in and removed the blue “pencil” lines I was using as a guide.

Now these are added into my drawing software, Clip Studio where I can touch up the drawings and remove any smudges or accidental lines from the inking. We then remove all the white. This means we have a black drawing on a transparent background. This is so that our colours go under the lines we have inked, rather than on top of them.

However, like all good colouring, we need to make sure we keep in between the lines so to do this I go through and identify broad areas of the same colour and mask these off. This leaves us with a glorious array of technicolour blocks that help me block off the areas I am going to be colouring.

Now we have our masks we can use this as the basis for our digital “watercolours”. Now, as much as I love real watercolours, working digitally is much easier. You don’t have to wait for the paint to dry, the colours don’t run and you can’t spill water all over yourself! I use a series of brushes in Clip Studio that give the impression of watercolour to broadly paint the scenery in various tones.

This lets me build up colours and character, giving depth to the blocks rather them being flat. We can then start to add layer masks to introduce elements of highlights and shade to really bring the characters and story to life.