Sketchbook to Screen: Exploring Procreate and Digital Coloring

Here’s a digital coloring in Procreate of a pencil drawing I did last year. I just wanted to have fun learning Procreate.

Warrior Woman Digital Colors
Warrior Woman Digital Colors in Procreate By Ralph Contreras

Coloring Adventures in Procreate with Green Haired Warrior Woman

I finally got the opportunity to mess around with Procreate. I bought an iPad this weekend, and the first app I bought was Procreate. I’m really excited to use it for digital illustrations. Or for coloring some of my older pencil illustrations. 

Here’s a digital coloring in Procreate of a pencil drawing I did last year. The drawing is of Warrior Woman, Scarmother Vrynna from Legends of Runeterra. I found the image reference on Pinterest and really wanted to draw her in my sketchbook. Check it out in this blog post.

The colors I chose aren’t like the original illustration. I just wanted to have fun learning Procreate, so I gave her green hair. I tried blending the colors and added shadow and highlight. I am really enjoying Procreate and can’t believe it’s taken me so long to use it.

Comic Book Digital Inking with Adobe Illustrator

Fantastic Four digitally inked by Ralph Contreras

Comic Book Digital Inking with Adobe Illustrator

Here is a digitally inked Pinup of an awesome penciled piece of the Fantastic Four by artist Ariel Padilla. I found the pencils on his DeviantArt page and I knew I had to ink it. I used Adobe Illustrator so I could create a vector image. This way it can be reduced or enlarged with no pixelation of the image. This is actually my second piece digitally inked but the first I’ve done in Illustrator. My Batman 2.0 character redesign was my first digitally inked piece but for that I used Photoshop. I have used Illustrator in the past to create illustrations, logos, advertisements, and marketing but this was the first time I incorporated my graphic design skills into inking.

I have a Wacom tablet but for this digital inking, I used only my mouse and the pen tool. So basically the piece is all straight vector anchor points. This illustration took about 5 hours, which is longer than I thought it would, but it was fun and a nice practice piece. On my next Illustrator ink, I plan on using the Wacom tablet and the brush tool. Right now it is all about having fun and learning to use the tools I use in my graphic design work in my comic book artwork. My next step will be to create flats for these inks and maybe color them too.

Original Pencils of Fantastic Four by Ariel Padilla

Here are the original pencils by Ariel Padilla.

Want to see the steps I took to create the digital inking? Check out my blog post: Comic Book Digital Inking Techniques with Illustrator Vector Anchor Points

This blog post was originally published on my other website Comic Book Graphic Design and has now been migrated here to RSC Arts, Ralph’s Art Blog.