Adding color to your artwork is the key to bringing your creations to life. By understanding color theory, experimenting with different mediums, and practicing techniques like blending and shading, you can transform your art into vibrant masterpieces. Don’t be afraid to explore and express your unique style through colors. With each piece, you’ll grow as an artist and inspire others with your colorful vision.
Make sure that you don’t make any unnecessary wiggles as you overlap your pencil outline with a permanent marker. Draw with a confident and clean hand strokes.
• Apply the color of the prints of your animals first.
If your animal has any kind of print (such as the polygonal prints of a giraffe), apply them first before you color the whole drawing with its primary color. In this way, you won’t have to overlap the coloring with another.
• Apply the primary color of your animal’s skin.
Complete the drawing by applying any other parts left with the color that nearly matches the real color of the animal, then make/cast a simple shadow on the lower side.
Another way of coloring is playing with your hand’s weight or adjusting the pressure you place on your coloring material depending on the area. This is very useful if the animal you are coloring only has few colors.
• Once you already outlined your drawing with a permanent marker, color the near sides of the drawing with more pressure on your hand strokes, then apply a lighter hand stroke on the middle portion of the drawing.
• If the area you are coloring only has few spaces in it, just simply color this portion with light hand strokes.
• Complete your cartoon drawing by casting a shadow below your subject/ animal.
If you want to apply more colors on your cartoon animal (such as the blending ability of a chameleon), your coloring should not overlap the other one or this will mess up your drawing.
• Apply different colors step by step.
• Do not place too much pressure on your hand strokes or this will result to flaking. Place any other embellishment or details on your animal’s skin with a pen. This is much easier to do if your drawing already has colors in it.
Don’t be an artist ‘by luck’. There are often times that you may have drawn some- thing good or decent but the picture came out from random sketch lines or by lucky stroke of an outline. You are an artist by luck if you are unable to draw the same thing or worse, you can’t even make the shapes that you drew before. You have to be able to remake or duplicate the same picture you already drew. If you know how to explain how you made your drawing then it means that you understood how you established your artwork.