Tutorial: Flowers - balancing color and lineart

Today I want to tell you about a little trick you can use in your drawings, it's about balancing lineart, that is, outlines: specifically, the amount of detail to show to compensate for coloring.

Style is always a very personal thing, we can go from a simple and graphic stroke, to a complex and richly detailed one, whether precise or chaotic, with an infinite range of possibilities in between, there is no right or wrong. We are just talking about being clever and using techniques that work to our advantage!

Knowing how to manage and balance the inking of details can be very useful if, for example, you have few copics and your drawing looks a little flat.

This time I am making use of a lineart I made digitally for clearer examples.

Here is the subject:

Flower petals are an excellent source of details, as are folds of clothing and hair textures.

Now let me show you a couple of examples. We have a simple lineart and a complex lineart, as well as colorations.

WARNING:

I did these steps only for teaching purposes, to better show the differences. Usually those AFTER going over the drawing, you don't necessarily have to proceed in the same way, it's difficult if you don't have a digital medium!

The coloring on the right is very simple and clean; it is not completely flat because I used some sharp shading and shading here and there to give volume, but it is a good example for beginners: the colors are spread well and evenly thanks to Copic's alcohol-based ink, and the effect is clean and neat! The flowers especially were colored flat, just being careful to stay well in the lines.

The left coloring, on the other hand, is very detailed, you can figure out all the volumes even without lines (which, again, is a demonstration step you can avoid, color following the steps you usually do!). Also use a lot more colors and technicalities, shadows, reflections. More shadows also means more colors.

Let's see now how they are assembled together:

The ideal is to combine a simple coloring with a complex line and vice versa. Neither version looks too drawn out or too chaotic.

The amount of detail in the line will give character to an otherwise less interesting drawing, maximum output with minimum coloring effort. It is a technique suitable for everyone.
(there are also adjustments you can make to line thicknesses, but these are more ink and less Copic things).

And this is why I did outlines and colors separately: I have a chance to show you how it would look if I reversed and matched complex lines and colors with simple lines and colors. You can see how so many lines go to ruin all those beautiful shading effects: this is because our eye perceives more of the contrast given by the dark line and the color around it loses detail.

It is absolutely a correct coloring and pleasant to look at, personal taste matters a lot. The best way to save these colors is to make them protagonists, with a less defined line. Let's remove all the bending and let the color give the details!

You can also decide to color the lineart. That's my favorite option, and there are Copic Multiliners for every taste, in this case sepia, blue and pink looked great on us.

Even a lineart full of details can be lightened by decreasing the contrast by coloring it. This will not ruin all the small attention to coloring.

I leave you with examples from one of my old tutorials from the Copic Italy blog on the same topic.

Alice