25 Sept 2019, 00:07

There are many ways to go about this. My suggestion would be to learn how to extract your linework from the white of the paper. I use this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mtlxqjvsq4&t=224s

This gives you more options for painting because you aren't fighting with the opacity of the paper.

I did this using your dragon line-work successfully, so you should be able to replicate it.

To mask the dragon- there's different ways. You can paint around the edges of the dragon, then paint in the middle to create the mask. If you use the pencil tool to paint around the edges, you can use the fill bucket to fill in the rest of the space.

Another way would be to lock the transparent pixels on your linework layer, then use the magic wand tool on the outside of the dragon, then inverse the selection (shift ctrl i or command i), create a new layer under the linework, and use the paint bucket to fill in the selection. You'd probably need to erase out or paint in a couple of areas after the selection is filled for this particular piece, but it would be faster than the first method I mentioned. The magic wand won't work well for every drawing- but it should work well for this one.