Artists in Japan and around the world are raving about this handy new tool.

The world of digital editing and design can be a difficult one to navigate for beginners more used to working with traditional materials like paint and paper. But now there’s an easy way to create digital masterpieces, thanks to a new web service that adds colour to your sketches at the touch of a button.

Developed by mechanical engineer @tai2an, the line drawing colouriser is called Paints Chainer, and it can work both automatically and semi-automatically, adding its own selection of hues to an image or allowing the artist to choose their preferred colour palette. The results are so impressive that artists from around the world have been enthusiastically sharing their artworks on Twitter.

These images show just how much difference a splash of colour can make to a line drawing. Whether it’s the simplest of line drawings…

…or the most detailed, these sketches are instantly brought to life with a variety of gorgeous hues.

▼ Paints Chainer works beautifully with moving images too.

The attention to dark and light shading is incredibly impressive, with points like the creases in this jacket given depth in the final result.

▼ The skin tones are also beautifully done.

https://twitter.com/B_Sah8/status/826421485992415233

The washed-out watercolour-style colours give images an ethereal, otherworldly look.

https://twitter.com/madara_sai_/status/824951574216613888

Paints Chainer chooses colours to fill in drawings on its own, or responds to hints from the artist to achieve personalised results.

It’s amazing to see how the same picture can take on a different appearance, depending on the colour palette used.

To try the new web service, you can visit the website here, or to see more beautiful artworks made with the handy tool, check out the hashtag #paintschainer on Twitter. And if you need to get started transforming your penciled illustrations into cleaner, more defined line drawings online, this other handy tool will help you get there!

Source: Net Lab
Featured image: Twitter/@cham05694773