I try to avoid using the paint bucket where I can to be honest.

I described how to isolate the black lines on a layer by themselves in an earlier comment. With the black lines isolated, I work in a few ways; on a layer underneath, I use the polygonal lasso tool to select the rough shape of the element I want to colour, fill it with my chosen colour and then use the eraser tool with my Wacom to erase what I don’t want. That’s way One. Way Two is good ol’ fashioned colouring in with the wacom. Way Three is tricky and rarely works properly. If I’ve dealing with closed loops, I sometimes (but not often at all) use the magic wand to select the part I would like to colour. I then modify the selection, growing it by a pixel or two, switch to a new layer underneath my line work, then fill it with colour. This is a messy way to do it and should be avoided if possible if you have any kind of daintiness in your lines.

Any of these ways gets rid of the unsightly white bits, but muck about with it and see what you can do. The joy of photoshop is that if you don’t like it, you can undo it!

Great post - thanks very much. I have two (very boring) photoshop questions for you. When you are filling with colours do you use the paintbucket? I find that using a fill tends to encroach on my line work, but equally decreasing the tolerance means I’m left with little white patches in certain areas. I wondered if you had any advice?

Also - is there anyway to select the black line work so that you can make it a layer?

Thanks so much!

I’ve not come across anything quite as nice yet. The ENO pencils do have really great lead, but I haven’t found a replacement yet. I’ve got a couple of Chromacolour Col-Erase pencils that are really nice, but I tend not to use them much because I am lazy and don’t like having to sharpen them all the time.

I know that you can still get the ENO leads from some places online, but if I find a suitable replacement, I’ll let you know!

Thanks - Dan