I'm working from some line art, but don't want the finished piece to be necessarily 'outlined' in black. Is there an easy way to do selections and have them overlap properly so that there's no white space in between?

Not sure I follow you there. Are you talking about knocking out the line art or doing the flats?

Vlad

Don't blame you for not following. Here's an example.



Above on the left is the lineart with some colors. On the right, if I want to drop the black outlines, it leaves a gap. How can I get rid of the gap when making my selections since the magic wand will only go right up to the edge of the black?

Well if you are working in Photoshop you can expand you selection by using

Select>Modify>Expand a few pixels would do it.

Vlad

Ah got it. Thanks Vlad!

Anytime

Judge.

I cannot comment on the image, as I cannot see it.

Are you doing this in Photoshop? If so, the most efficient way to do this so that there are no white gaps would be to follow this simple procedure:

1) Select the entire canvas (select all);

2) Copy (CTRL-C);

3) Paste (CTRL-V);

4) In the 'layers' window, this should appear as 'layer 1' or somesuch. There should be a tab/menu on it that says 'normal'. Change that item to 'darken';

5) Go back to the background layer ('layer 1' should have been selected, so if you click on 'background' it should now select that layer);

6) Deselect (from when you had selected the entire canvas/picture);

7) Paint on that background layer. Your lineart is now floating on 'layer 1', and you can paint freely 'under' it on the background layer';

8) Save this as a 'working' file, so you can play around with it; It'll have to be a Photoshop file (.psd)

9) Once you are done painting it, go to the 'layers' menu and choose (from the little triangular tab) 'flatten image' or something similar. Save this as a 'final' file (as a .jpg or whatever).

That's a quick n' dirty procedure for painting with lineart. I do all kinds of things with channels and multiple layers and stuff, stuff that is hard to get across in teh internetz, but this should do you for now

***** WARNING *****

If you flatten the image you will no longer be able to go back and edit individual layers. You might want to consider using the "Save For Web" option instead. This will save your image as a jpg and you will still be able to edit individual layers at a later date.