Art on accessible.tips

Digital Art Composition Book

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Attribution

This is a fully syndicated copy of KemoNine’s ‘Digital Art Composition Book’ blog post. It has been posted here, in full, with permission. This post reads like an anecdote but is focused on a practical approach to creating a digital composition book for art. Due to this we’ve included KemoNine’s post as a tip, rather than anecdote as we feel this is more of a ’tip’ than ‘anecdote’.

Note: we’ve only applied our standard site formatting to the post, inclusive of our section navigation links. The original post remains unchanged otherwise.

Convert Photo to Coloring Page

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sounds Cool, Is Tricky

Before getting into how to convert a photo into a coloring page, I’d like to point out a fundamental concern: this is not easy and a mild PITA. It also deserves some manual cleanup to get best results. I recommend doing this only if you have time to try the process and focus on some of the subtleties while also converting a ton of photos.

Like most forms of art, this one takes some practice to get desired results. I got disheartened early on but after running the process on tens of images I started getting a feel for what source images worked for conversion and as a more ‘realistic’ coloring page.

Converting PDF Coloring Pages

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Required Program

If you have access to imagemagick you can quickly convert a PDF coloring page(s) to grayscale PNG using the below procedure and notes.

Notes

The pdfimages will get you a dpi listing for each page in the PDF that has an image, use that value instead of 300 in the below, if it is present.
The -type Grayscale parameter can be removed if you need color output.

Conversion

Install imagemagick
pdfimages -list shipspage1.pdf
for file in `ls *.pdf`; do convert -density 300 -type Grayscale ${file} ${file}.png; done

External Resources

Digital Coloring and Drawing

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Figure 1: An in-progress coloring page

Analog?

I’ve spent a long time staring at my sketchbook and wanting to draw and color but… my desk situation is such that I’d have to spend at least 5 minutes getting it cleared enough for drawing/coloring, then I’d have to put it back the way it was so I could type when I was done, I’d have to turn on the light at night (I like dark).

Krita Color Palettes

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Palettes

Below you’ll find a link to a color palette generator I use as well as a number of Krita color palettes I’ve created.

The zip files can be extracted into the Krita palettes directory for use. Please see the Krita official docs for more detail on how to setup a new palette.

Zentangle Template Images

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Templates

The attached files are files I created as a ‘Zentangle Template’. It’s setup to be a 3.5" square with a 2nd ‘circle’ layer if you’d like to create a circular Zentangle. These are aimed at the digital artist who wants a basic canvas to start from.

Download Krita (kra) File

Download Photoshop (psd) File