Magic Wand - Line Art

[Nichalous5C0A]

I have been trying to figure out how digital arts color inside the lines so perfectly well with their line art. 

From what I have been noticing is that they use the magic wand tool. I figured out to the point of using 'alt' & 'ctrl' to add or subtract from the selection. However all it does is line the lines, not the space within the lines I want to color. I also get an error 'Warning- No pixels more than 50% were selected'.

As you can figure out I am a total noob to photoshop and I want to learn more. I simply want to be able to color inside the lines, that are very often glossed over in digital artists tutorials that I watch. 

[Chuck Uebele]

I would have your line art on a separate layer. Then make sure you click in the empty space inside the lines. Then I would modify the selection by a pixel or two, depending on how thick you line art is. Then on a layer below the line art, I would fill with the color you want.

[Mylenium]

Using magic wand directly sounds rather weird and unsophisticated, TBH. If it's really just line art, a simple Image --> Calculations to create  clean transparency would probably the better way. Then you can use that layer on top of everything and color in all the areas beneath using whatever method you prefer, including brushes or of course fills based on all manner of selections. Especially for small areas adding a bunch of basic brush strokes may be much more efficient then trying to get complex selections right...

Mylenium

[Trevor.Dennis]

Adding to what Chuck has told you, you had the right idea using the Magic Wand, but instead of selecting each petal (using this flower as an example) make sure Contiguous is checked in the Options bar, and select outside the line art.

Then invert the selection (Shift Ctrl i — Shift Cmd i) and fill the selection with your colour of choice on a new layer below the line art layer.

Even if the line art is on a white background, you can make the white become transparent by changing the line art layer's blend mode to Multiply or Darken.

Or you can make an internal selection with the Magic Wand, and use Select > Modify > Expand to increas the selection by a couple of pixels, and fill that selection with colour as with the yellow.

Anotheer trick you can use is to Ctrl click a layer's thumbnail to load it as a selection, and then stroke the selection with black to create new line work around it.  If you do this using Layer Styles (double click the layer to open layer styles) then the stroke (as will all layer styles) is non destructive and can be edited.

Let's go back to the red petal layer.  Now you have that shape you can lock the transparent pixels as below

And apply gradients etc. and your line work remains unaffected.  To edit the gradient, double click it in the options bar.

I alsmot wish I was in your shoes starting out with Photoshop, because you have an exciting journey ahead of you.