Learning techniques for making digital line drawings and shading those drawings lets you create artwork with colors and lines will never fade or smudge, unlike drawing with physical media such as charcoal and pencil. As you create your digital drawings, take the time to learn your program's layering and selection tools. Layers let you create drawings by stacking individual images atop each other. Selection tools let you cut and paste images.
Paintbrush and Pencil
Open a paint program and run one of its tools for painting or drawing on the screen. These tools may include pencils or paintbrushes. To choose a color with which to draw, click the color swatch on your program's main tool palette. Your program will display a new window filled with a spectrum of colors. Clicking a color will load it onto your pencil tool for drawing. For your first drawings, use black lines on a white background. If this contrast is too stark for you, minimize the contrast by using your program's "Fill" or "Paint Bucket" tool to fill the background with a light gray tone. Also, you can subtly suggest different moods and media by using different colors for the foreground. For example, clicking a brown hue with which to draw may suggest a drawing made with a tangible medium such as Conte crayon.
Hatching
When you're ready to give your drawing a greater sense of volume by shading it, there are many approaches you can take. One is to use your program's line, paintbrush, or pencil tools to draw crisscrossed lines, which results in cross hatching. This effect indicates a surface not lit by direct light. Use a dark color for hatching, such as a brown, dark grey or black. These colors suggest shade, whereas light colors suggest light.
Filling Tools
Your program's "Fill" or "Paint Bucket" tool will allow you to shade closed shapes with a single mouse click. Closed shapes are those with no gaps in their outlines. Circles are examples of such shapes. Click a color you'd like to shade with from your program's color palette and then click a closed shape to fill it with the color you chose. For expressive effects, use your program's feature for filling with patterns or color gradients instead of a uniform color. Many digital artists use gradient fills for photo-realistic shading, especially on rounded forms like cylinders.
Pen and Paths
Many drawing programs have a "Pen" tool with which you can draw "Paths." Paths are graphical objects you can shape, move, scale and transform in other ways, in contrast to the raster graphics created with the drawing and paint tools. For example, you can draw an ellipse with paths and then change the path's handles, called nodes, to reshape the ellipse into something else. After you're satisfied with the shape, run your program's "Stroke" command to paint the path. Some programs perform this stroking operation automatically.
