Coloring Doodles

I’ve had several people email me lately asking how I recolor my doodles, so I thought I’d post about it here for those who aren’t quite sure how to use them.

I’m using one of my Rawr dinosaur doodles in this example.  I don’t like having a black outline on my finished image, so I’ll show you how to do it that way.  It’s basically the same if you want to keep the black outline, just don’t delete it at the end. 

(Just a note: I’m using CS3 here, I’m not sure how similar the process is in other programs.)

First select your magic wand.  I use the following settings:

Now click inside the area you want colored and expand your selection (I always expand by about 12 pixels).

Then add a new layer under your doodle outline.

Choose your paint bucket tool and click inside the marquee to add your color.

Now using your magic wand again, click inside the other areas you want colored (press your SHIFT key to select multiple areas) and expand your selection.

Add a new layer under your colored layer (I do this so that I can add shading later) and fill with color.

Deselect all.

Now I want to get rid of the outline, so I delete the doodle outline layer and I have this:

So now add a new layer to the top and add an eye with a round brush.

Then select your top colored layer and go to layer effects and select inner shadow.  Choose a darker shade of the color you used to fill the doodle.  Here are the settings I used for this:

Repeat on the other colored layers.  So here’s what I have now:

I like to do a little more, like adding an acrylic style to the eye to make it stand out.  I gave it some spots on it’s back and I also add a drop shadow to the top layers to give it more dimension.  The maybe merge the layers and add an overlay to give it some texture.  And here’s what I ended up with:

Easy peasy!  Hopefully that wasn’t too long-winded, but I wanted to be thorough.  lol

And if you want it, you can download my finished dinosaur HERE.

Now go have some fun with doodles!