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I promised a while back that I would write about some of the ways I use Photoshop when I’m drawing.

As I said then, I should add that I can’t give a tutorial as to the best way to use Photoshop: I’m self-taught, and as a result I have no doubt that some of my methods are eccentric or go about things in a rather long-winded way.

Because of that, I’d love it if these posts (I plan a series) could be seen less as instruction, and more as a forum. You’re welcome to comment with ‘I do it this way’, or ‘You’re nuts! Why do you do it like that?’.

In any case, I think it’s helpful to see Photoshop as a tool when you use it for art, rather than the photo-editing software it truly is. So, just as you might hold a brush one way or use watercolours in a certain manner, so Photoshop can be wielded in many different styles. I assume, in fact, that originally it was Paintshop which was designed to be used by artists, and it is only because of Photoshop’s ubiquity that it has been picked up in this way. If that’s so, using it for any sort of art other than photo retouching can be seen as an interesting deviation - and there IS no wrong way.

Anyway. Today I’m going to look at how to select and colour in areas of a picture. The way I generally work is that I will start with a line drawing on paper, which I scan in. Experience has taught me that if I am going to use the tools I favour, any blank areas I intend to colour in must be completely enclosed.

Once you’ve scanned your picture in, there are various ways to set about colouring it in.

The first and most obvious way is to simply use a brush or pencil tool - after all, that is the direct parallel to what you would do in real life. However, especially if you are using a mouse rather than a graphics tablet, it’s hard to use these tools with any accuracy. That’s why some of the other tools come into their own.

First, here’s the paintbucket. This is a handy way of filling in enclosed spaces with a single colour. Click anywhere on your picture, and it will fill your image as far as any borders.

You can set the ‘tolerance’ of the paintbucket: if you want to ignore minor discolourations or marks on your page, set the tolerance high. If you want to make them a feature, or if your borders are barely discernible from the background, set a low tolerance - experiment with the figures here and you’ll see what I mean. Setting a tolerance of 100 will allow you to flood the entire picture with colour.

The paintbucket is rather a broad tool, useful for colouring large areas quickly, and, with high opacity and high tolerance, it will create quite flat images, like the one I put at the top of this post.

The lasso tool allows you to do slightly more refined work. With this, you can select any area of your picture. Once selected, a dotted line will appear around the ‘active’ area, and any other part of the picture will remain unaffected. In watercolours, artists often use masking tape or masking fluid for the same reason - you can paint broadly over the ‘covered’ areas without spoiling them.

If you want to select more than one area simultaneously, you can hold down your ’shift’ key (on a PC) while using the lasso tool. Similarly, if you want to remove a selected area, you can hold down the ‘alt’ key.

Once you’ve selected your chosen areas, you can use a brush, pencil, the paintbucket, or any other tools, safe in the knowledge that you have isolated those areas for attention.

The magic wand is an easier tool to use than the lasso - especially if you are working with a mouse - but can be used for much the same effect. It basically selects a tonal area based on where in the image you click. Again, you can set the tolerance so that it selects tones within a very close range or a very wide range - it’s worth playing about with this tool to really get an understanding of it. And again, once your areas are selected, you can do with them as you will. As with the lasso tool, you can add or subtract areas with your shift and alt keys.

Well, that took a lot longer to describe than it does to actually do, so I suggest that you now go and have a play around, and come back here and tell me what I’ve missed out.