In my Digital Illustration class my professor has assigned us a project where we take an existing black and white line drawing of a bug scene and color it using Photoshop. We were given free range on how we wanted to approach coloring it using any tools, colors, or styles we want. This kind of freedom can either be a blessing or a curse for each individual.

For my project I started off with a basic color for each object in the picture. Color choice can be difficult, so I imagined what some objects would be colored and tried to incorporate that color in more than one place. I also tried to pick colors that were complementary to each other. I colored the grass a green, the ground brown, and the sky blue. My goal was to get down base colors and go back and add detail later on. This plan changed a little when my professor showed me a few different techniques of coloring in Photoshop.

He started by showing me that I could change the hue and saturation of the colors I already had placed down to give the picture a whole new look and effect. So instead of my original idea of having a daytime scene with bright colors I changed the hue to have a much cooler nighttime effect. To add detail, we were shown different paintbrush tools to give different textures, changing the roundness of the brush, and many other brush aspects. I used a few types of brush tips to get a leafy texture on the bushes, a coarse texture for the dirt, and another texture for the grass.