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This style of coloring is ideal for coloring comic or animation characters. If you're
familiar with Japanese Anime, then you will notice a very similiar look as that is what
we're mimicing here.
What we learn here though can easily be adapted or modified to generate a totally different
style of coloring. The techniques used here are fairly basic and good to know.
So are you ready? Well let's get started then...
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| Step: 1 - Prep Your Ink |
Well before we can color, we first need a prep'd Ink! So if you haven't done so already,
you'll need to visit the Preparing an Ink Drawing for Color
tutorial before you can continue here.
Okay so after prep'n your Ink, you should have two layers, Ink and Background.
Click on the background layer. Now from the Layer menu, highlight New,
then choose Layer...(you can also just click the New Layer button on the Layer
palette).
Double-click this new layer to bring up it's properties dialog. In it's Name edit
box, type in ``Select Tool". Click OK.
Finally, make sure the Select Tool layer is under the Ink layer. If it
isn't, click and drag the Select Tool layer under the Ink layer there in the
Layer palette.
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| Step: 1.1 - Thumbnail |
When coloring on the computer, you're more than likely to zoom way in and color it like
that. That's what most of us do.
However, it's important to watch your image develop as a whole while you color. It's
so easy to say make a line and decide it's right zoomed in at 300%, then zoom out a while
later and see how off it looks.
Or worse yet, trying to tweak a line that you think looks bad but no one can even
notice in the smaller final version.
So this is what I do. From the View menu, choose New View. This will create
a second window with your image in it. With one of them, zoom out to about what you think
will be the rendered size and then drag it off to the left side.
With the second window, resize the window so it fills up the rest of your working area.
Should look a little like what we see on the image above. We'll paint in the right
view, zoomed way in for control. And watch it progress in the left view, zoomed way out so
we can see it as a whole.
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| Step: 2 - Selecting Regions to Color |
Now what we're going to do is use the Polygon Lasso tool to select one region at a
time to color. The Polygon Lasso tool is circled in the image on the left.
This is important here. After activating the Polygon Lasso tool, double-click it's
button. The Options palette for the Polygon Lasso tool should then appear.
Two options are in this box, Feather which should be set to 0. And then
Anti-Aliased which needs to be unchecked.
If you forget to uncheck Anti-Aliased before selecting your regions, you'll have to deselect,
uncheck it, and then start over. So make sure it's unchecked now!
So... what are we selecting? What we're going to do is select every major region of
color, one area at a time, and fill it with the color we want. Major regions of color in
the picture we're working on would be her skin, hair, and suit.
So we'll begin by selecting all areas of skin in this picture with our polygon lasso
tool.
Remember, if you hold down ALT while starting a selection, you can minus from the
current selection. And if you hold down SHIFT while starting a selection, you can add
to the current selection.
So I went through and selected her face and neck first, then using SHIFT, added her arms,
stomach, legs, etc. And I used ALT to minus away any accidents.
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| Step: 3 - Fill In With Color |
Well after all areas of the skin are selected, we are ready to fill in the skin color.
First off, make sure your Select Tool layer is the layer we're painting to.
Now choose the Paint Bucket tool. It looks like a paint bucket in your tool bar.
Double-click it, that will bring up it's Options palette.
There are few options here, make them look something like the image on the left. The
most important option here would be the Anti-Aliased option, ensure it is unchecked.
Now pick a color to use. For my picture here, I used the Eyedropper tool and pulled a
skin color from another image. I know, I cheated. The hex value for this skin color is
#FCC9BF. You can enter that value into Photoshop's color dialog.
Once you're ready, go ahead and click anywhere in the selected area. This is what we see in
the bottom image at left.
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| Step: 4 - Select and Color Rest of Image |
Now just continue to select and fill in other regions of your image until the whole figure
is colored in.
Before we started to shade the image, I wanted to first point out a nifty tip that can
help speed you along as you color.
You know how we've been turning off Anti-Aliasing all over the place? Well the reason
for that is so we get a hard edge fill. Anti-aliasing is supposed to blur edges to make
things look more natural together. However, we have no need for this as our edges are hidden
under the the Inked lines.
Turning anti-aliasing off yields an advantage for us at this point. Look in the image on
the left and look at the dashed line representing the selection for the suit. Notice how
the selection isn't following the lines for areas touching other color'd areas?
You see, your fill tool when filling, will continue filling in areas until it either A comes
to the bounds of your selection or B, finds another color.
So when selecting the suit, I only needed to follow the lines when that area touched the
white (aka, the background). The fill tool will then fill up to those points. Everywhere else,
the fill tool will fill up to the skin color.
Not having to follow the lines like this can really help to speed this part of the coloring
process.
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| Step: 5 - Getting Ready to Shade |
So now all the major areas of color are filled in. Which in this picture, is her skin,
hair, and suit. We can get ready to shade now.
Click and drag your Select Tool layer to the Create New Layer button
there at the bottom of the Layer palette (or choose Duplicate Layer from the Layer menu).
This will make the layer, Select Tool Copy. Double-click the layer and bring up
it's layer properties. For it's name, type in ``Color". Click OK.
Finally, click and drag the Color layer so that it is under the
Select Tool layer in the Layer palette.
When you're done, you should have something that looks like what we have on the left.
The Color layer is what we're going to shade on.
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| Step: 6 - The Magic Wand |
Almost ready to shart shading, we just have to do one more step. Now you'll find out what
the Select Tool layer is for.
When we color and shade, we want to be reasonably sloppy and not have to worry about
skin colors spilling into say the suit. We do this by reselecting the skin region.
We do that by first activating the Select Tool layer. Then choosing the Magic Wand
tool from the tool bar. Double-click the Magic Wand button and set it's Options to exactly
what you see on the left.
Now in your image, left click anywhere on the skin. The Magic Wand will then select all
pixels on this layer matching the skin color. With this selection, we'll only be able to
color inside her skin, no where else.
Go ahead and select the Color layer now and turn off the Select Tool's
visibility. We don't want to see it at this point.
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| Step: 7 - Shading |
Finally, we get to shade. As you can see on the left, I chose a darker color of the skin
color and started to shade where the light didn't reach.
This is where you can start to tweak and do your own thing. Many artist for example, like a more
blended look with the shades of color instead of this hard edged shading. You can
do whatever you want. This hard edged cell style look is by far the easiest and fastest
to do.
The typical rule of thumb btw is to have at least a base color, 1 darker color, and 1 lighter color.
This gives you 3 levels of lighting. As you can see on the left, I have the minimal 3
shades of the skin color, base color, shadow, and highlight. I've also added an extra level
of shading, slightly darker than the first shadow color.
This was to help us shade in the shadows. You can have however many levels of shading
you want in you picture. The more levels you add, the more your image will give a preception
of depth.
Overall I kept this really simple.
Oh yeah, I used a soft paint brush for this. I also turned the Stylus option Size on,
and the Opacity/Color off. These options are for a drawing tablet which is
highly recommended to speed this up. But it's not required if you have a good grasp on how
to work the Pen tool.
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| Step: 8 - Still Shading... |
Once I finished with the skin, I activated my Select Tool layer. Then used the
Magic Wand tool to select the next region I wanted to color (which was her hair).
Then I turned off the Select Tool layer's visibility again and reselected the
Color layer.
Now in the case of her hair, I went through and get it all the dark shading. Then
I created a new layer above the Color layer, and colored her hair highlights
on that layer. I did this because sometimes I do a lot of goofing with hair highlights
and so I like to be able to easily erase and mistakes and go at it again.
You can do whatever you want however. You're probably more talented than me and don't have
to worry bout mistakes. -_o
Btw if you haven't noticed, you only need a minimal of 4 layers to color a picture
doing this. This should come as a huge relief to the those of us who are working on
computers that aren't so powerful and lack RAM.
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| Step: 9 - Finished |
And we're done. I went ahead and did up a super cheap background for my pic here. (:
A picture always needs a background though. So long as it's not the white background
you painted on. Having a background in mind when sketching btw can greatly enhance your
finished product.
I decided the colors I used weren't bright enough.. I sort of wanted her to look
a little like she was out in the sun. So I quickly adjusted the Contrast/Brightness of
the pic. An easy fix.
That's it, hope you learned something!
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Adobe PhotoShop 7.0
Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 (affordable alternative to PS)
Corel Painter 8 (more ideal for digtal painting than PS)
Wacom Graphire3 Pen, Mouse & Tablet Set
Wacom Intuos2 6x8 Graphics Tablet
Canon CanoScan LiDE 30 Scanner
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