Tutorial: Converting Traditional Art to Digital Art

Hello, Aurorians! Today's tutorial is made under the urgent request of Kirameki... who had problems with her drawing tablet. Unfortunate it seems, but I'm very happy that she is willing to draw in the simplest digital art program-- Microsoft Paint.

Today, I'll be working on an old drawing of Feral Fortune, one of my pony characters. As you can see, this picture is unfinished. It is most likely from early 2016, before I developed a cleaner style.

Now back to work! The first step I'm going to do is to resize the picture so it'll be easier to work on.

After I have that taken care of, I shall start tracing.... But not so fast! You should know which colors to use for tracing.

These are pure (or highly saturated) colors. Don't look at them for too long, or they'll burn your eyes. You can get these colors from the 'Edit colors' and select the colors in the black boxes (shown below). If you are using the older version of MS Paint, you won't have to add these colors since they are already prepared.

Just because there are 6 colors, doesn't mean you should use all of them. It depends on the amount of colors you have on your original picture.

On to tracing! I've decided to use red for the coat lineart. Make sure you use the curve tool!

Don't mind the white specks, I just cleaned the lines a little. Anyway, you should categorize each color. As mentioned, I chose red for the coat lineart; dark blue for the mane; and pink for the streaks and accessories. Keep in mind that you should not use colors that are similar with the original. In this case, I avoid using green for the coat. This is also helpful when you are trying to tell apart which line is which!

The tracing is done! I fixed the eyes, made it shorter by a bit. The next step is to save it as a 16 color bitmap file. It may sound complicated, but trust me, it's not. It reduces the picture to only have 16 colors. Your picture will be easy to erase this way.

Now most of the picture is gray, and that's supposed to happen. The lineart still stands out. Firstly, use the color picker to select the background colors. With the color as color 1, right hold on your mouse while using the eraser tool.

Okay so I had dark gray as color 1. Once you erased it, only dark gray will be gone. It will not disturb the other colors.

Repeat this step with the other colors until your background is all white.

I took the time to correct a few parts as well as filling in the coat, eye, and hair streaks. Then, I saved it to a PNG file.

Again, use the right hold erasing technique to change the color of your lineart. This time, set color 2 to your desired color. If you leave it white, you might erase it to the white background!

All that's left it to fill in the spaces then you're good to go! You can also shade your picture or just head to online-image-editor.com to give it a transparent background. To prevent art theft, make sure to put your watermark on it.

NOTES

• You can refer to base-making tutorials on DeviantArt. There are tons of them, you just have to find the right one!
• You MUST NOT use this tutorial for tracing other people's work. The only thing you should trace is your own drawing or photo.
• You do not have the right to use the pictures shown in this tutorial.
• My Little Pony (c) Hasbro