Digital Coloring – No Crayons Needed is an easy approach for people of all ages to be able to color within the lines – or not. Did you know that digital coloring can actually do two things for us: 1. Helps refocus our minds from what is happening in our lives; 2. Helps relax us and in some cases helps our creative self to surface. People of all ages are still coloring with colored pencils or crayons. Some even take it to the next level by doing water colors or oil painting.
As a child most of us had coloring books and used either real crayons or colored pencils which allowed us to be the master of our drawing without someone saying, “it shouldn’t be that color.”
Children love to draw pictures for their parents to put up on the refrigerator or on an art board. As the children get older some keep on drawing and some give it up because it is no longer cool to use crayons or colored pencils. Coloring books are thrown aside and blank drawing paper is left in the drawer.
There was also a time where we did color by number and it was sometimes in books but mostly on paintings that we hung on the wall. The object here was to reproduce a master or some type of scenery. In some cases this was almost a family time activity and everyone in the family could participate.
Currently on the market there are boxes of colored pencils which contain 100 or two hundred different colored pencils and when the pencils are flat they will need to be sharpened. The problem is that sometimes the pencil shavings always seem to find a place where the vacuum can’t go. The other problem is that when your favorite color is worn down, the crayon or pencil will need to be replaced.
With the use of the computer everyone can do digital coloring in some fashion. Windows computers have some type of paint program where you can open a file and just start painting followed by saving and/or printing you artwork. There are free internet programs that will allow for uploading of images which you will be able to paint, save and print. Photo editing software, like Photoshop Elements, can be installed on your computer and it has a ton of features that will enhance the digital coloring process. Instead of having hundreds of colors, now the colors are only constrained by your imagination.
The one thing about digital coloring is that it can be done any time of any day, no matter where you are. Travel sometimes has dead times and coloring can help relieve the stress of traveling and yet produce something pretty nice. Free printable can be found on the web and downloaded so that the digital artist now has a place to start. There are coloring books that can be purchased and the drawings scanned and used to create digital art.
Photoshop Elements was previously mentioned and now it is time to talk about the capabilities of this application. First of all when coloring, each color can go on a separate layer which makes corrections a lot easier. Finding your choice of color is pretty easy and it could be that there never was a pencil made in that color. Colored pencils and crayons have to be replaced when worn down however digital colors are there for as long as you want to use them, thus saving some money.
One of the nice things about doing digital coloring is that you can use your artwork in various other creations such as Video, Colleges and even Social Media posts.
Sandy Moniz Digital Coloring, Digital Coloring, Sandy Moniz, Sandy Moniz Traveler Author Imagineer
