Welcome back to Draw with Brian.
In this episode, we continue working on the illustration for Derrick and Max’s Beach Adventure, focusing on coloring the King and Knight during their shouting match scene.
This session dives into layer management, color consistency, and some real-time problem solving as we refine the image and experiment with emphasis and tone.
Transcript
Hello. Let’s get our camera going… hey, there we go. Helps when the cover’s open.
Welcome to the channel. Last time I started working on the king and knight shouting scene. I had begun coloring, but something happened to that recording — it just disappeared on us — so we’re going to pick back up from there.
Normally, I work from back to front on the roughs, and then front to back on the inks and coloring. There’s no reason to color something if it’s going to be completely hidden by what’s in front of it.
So let’s work on our king here.
I’ve got some reference images loaded up, and hopefully I remembered to save the colors. Let’s see… yes, good.
You can use the eyedropper tool in ArtRage, but what I’ve found is that if you use it repeatedly, the color can start to drift. Then you lose consistency. I like to save specific color swatches so everything stays uniform.
We’ll start with the darker areas on the arms. We’ll try the fill tool because it’s quick and smooth… but sometimes you get bleed-through if your lines aren’t fully closed. And there it goes.
So instead of fighting it, we’ll switch to brush and do it manually.
One thing I like to do: lift the stylus occasionally. If you make a mistake, you won’t have as much undoing to do.
We ran into some bleed-through from Derrick behind the king, so we’ll clean that up first. This is why working front to back matters — if background ink isn’t cleaned up, color escapes.
Alright, I think we’ve cleaned up Derrick’s stray lines. Let’s try filling again.
That looks better.
Now we’ll erase carefully around the edges. This is one of those relaxing parts of the process. I don’t know how it is for you watching, but for me, this kind of slow, detailed cleanup is calming. Art should be fun. If it’s your job, maybe there’s more pressure. But without deadlines, this can just be enjoyable.
We’ll fill in the black trim now. Because we’ve already filled the red, the black stops cleanly against it.
Next we’ll add a secondary red tone. I noticed we didn’t fully close a line earlier, so let’s fix that in the ink layer first. Much easier than erasing a ton later.
Close enough for government work — as my dad used to say.
Now we’ll fill that secondary color. Nice bright white for the beard and mustache. For skin tones, I kept things simple in this world. Real life has much more variation, obviously, but using one consistent skin tone keeps the palette manageable.
We’ll fill the crown… ah, there’s a gap. Instead of erasing a bunch, we’ll just fix the ink line and try again.
That works.
Now for the black knight.
Remember: color layers go beneath ink layers. Otherwise your color will cover your lines.
Let’s create a new layer: Black Knight Color.
First, more cleanup of Derrick’s hidden lines. You really want to do that before coloring, or you’ll pay for it later.
Now we’re seeing the knight’s face for the first time.
We’ll follow the same color logic as the king — lighter primary, darker secondary. He’s a black knight, so let’s give him black hair. Mustache too.
If we use pure black for both the hair and mouth, they bleed together. That doesn’t look great. So instead, we’ll make the hair slightly lighter than pure black so the shapes stay readable.
Digital art makes these adjustments easy. On oil canvas? Not so much.
Let’s fill his skin. Same skin tone as Derrick for consistency.
We noticed he was missing a glove — good thing we caught that before finishing. That’s why this stage exists. Much easier to fix now than after printing.
We’ll finish the armor colors, clean up some edges, and zoom out.
There we go.
Our king is done. Our black knight is done.
Next time we’ll finish what little remains of Derrick and add the background color.
Let’s save.
Thanks for drawing along with me. I hope you enjoyed it. Stay well — until next time.
If you enjoy these behind-the-scenes drawing sessions, you can find more episodes in the Draw with Brian series.
You can also learn more about my books and artwork at bdcrowell.com.
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