Five, and Digital Coloring

This template of Patti Knox's at Designer Digitals was the perfect excuse to use an element from my little Candle Wordart Kit...



I love doing digital coloring--it's about the only time I ever manage to color inside the lines. For this kind of thing, you use the magic wand set to 1 pixel tolerance, anti-aliased, and contiguous. On the layer where you have the black and transparent .png, highlight the areas you want to color the same color. Then, create a new layer, move it under the .png, and fill with the paint bucket. You can either fill with gradients, or a flat color, onto which you can then brush varying levels of shadow. Just remember to keep your selection till you're done coloring. You can create a different color layer for each section, too, and that lets you use your hue/color adjustment slider later on to fine-tweak the colors. It's a lot of fun!