How to Color Line Work in Procreate

A few of my projects this year had me try out some different styles. One of the styles was a more simplistic style with some flat coloring. This is my process on how I took an inked drawing and colored it in Procreate.

Here is the piece I had drawn in ink with microns:

To be able to do this technique successfully, make sure to get a quality scan of it, then put it into Photoshop.

Next go to the top toolbar and go under “Select”, then “Color Range”.

Under Color Range you can play with the fuzziness slider to get as much detail from the scan selected as possible. Hit okay once you have picked a good color range. Everything selected should be white in the preview.

Now your image will look like this with all of the inked sections selected:

On the layers panel, go down to the bottom and click “mask”. The mask will appear on the same layer as your image and the white of the paper you inked on will now be transparent.

Right click on the mask and click “Apply Mask”.

You can now save the image as a .psd file, make sure that the color mode is set to RGB. You can then transfer the file to your device with Procreate installed.

Once in Procreate open the image and turn on the white background (Just click the checkmark on the background color layer). Then duplicate the layer with your drawing on it and add a new layer in between the duplicated layers.

You can now paint on this layer without having to try to stay inside the lines!

Here is how I ended up coloring this piece:

Using this process is a great way to save time and makes coloring a lot easier!