![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
COLORING TUTORIAL
now for something totally different this is an oldschool coloring tutorial i did for back in the day when i was still coloring anime/manga panels...it's really outdated and i'm just going to upload it as i found it preserved and covered in dust in a folder somewhere on my desktop so enjoy lol
______
SETUP:
whip your image out. we're tutorialing with naoto and nill today. i'm using ps..cs2? in this? (it's been a while and i can't remember what it was sorry!)
in your prep make sure that you erase screentones! you can do it without erasing them, but itll make it look worse. sometimes im lazy and i dont do this, but i always like the end result when i have very clean lineart. if you want to keep them as guidelines for shading (it helps sometimes), duplicate the lineart layer and save the original screentones but keep it invisible until you need it for reference.
make sure your blacks are true black and your white isnt grungy. dingy blacks will result in color bleedover. you can use levels to make your whites white and your blacks blacker.
first separate the lineart from the background:
- set to grayscale
- duplicate the layer
- erase the layer that is now the background so that it's white
- set the lineart to Multiply
- set back to RGB
now:
- make a folder in between the white background and the lineart
- create a bunch of new empty layers in the folder
- make an empty layer above the lineart for highlights
your layers should look like sth this:
i've made an action to do all this shit for me by now, which makes setup a lot faster.
palette:
- make sure you have color swatches set up for ease of use. i use three colors for my skintone, a cream color that i use for whites, and a dark grey/brown that i use for blacks. any other frequently used colors like hair tones should be on your palette as well.
protip: don't use a shade of white for the eyes, use an off-white that looks white in the context of the image. pure white in the eyes is usually too glaring.
my palette:
______
BASE COLORS:
- use a hard round brush, paintbucket or magic wand to block in your base colors.
- use the darkest color range of your skin palette when you block in the skin. we'll color darkest to lightest so it'll come in handy later. yes they look like ganguro girls now. idc.
- !important! make sure you block in all the large areas of clothing separately. for ease of coloring later, youll want separate layers for each article.
- make sure you lock your transparent pixels on each layer after you block in the color. it will make shading much easier.
______
GRADIENTS:
k now we actually start coloring. i usually start with the skin because it's my favorite.
- take a soft round brush that's about the circumfrence of the face.
- pick up your mid-range skintone ( you should have at least three: dark (shadows), midrange, and light (highlights) ) and start laying down a base gradient on the face:
this is done by applying color in the center of the face only. the brush should cover it in a circular area so that only the edges remain darkish.
- pick the lightest skintone and lay another gradient on top of that. this should make the face your "base color" or lightest skintone for the majority of the surface area, with gradually darkening edges.
- now lay down this base gradient on every part of your skintone. it doesn't even have to make sense as far as light sources go this is not professional coloring this is sparta.
just keep in mind when gradienting arms and legs that theyre cylindrical, so lay down the brush in the center and make sure there's dark on either side so that it gives the effect of a shaded tube. i am sure you know this.
now we have this really crudely done skintone, no accounting for shadows and no shading, just the base.
______
SHADING AND DETAILS:
ook now comes the detail work such as it is. zoom back in on dat face and lets go.
- choose your airbrush hard round. i use this for detail work at all times unless i have to work on something extremely small and precise. it makes the colors blend more smooth and compliments the gradient base well.
- first things first, i take the lightest skintone and outline the face, ears, and edges of the body (neck, fingers, tits, legs, etc.). no accounting for lighting because fuck that noise, these bitches are backlit 24/7 with their own personal lightsource.
so lets get to highlighting:
k that cheap lil trick has put us in business and its looking better. next is shading of the face.
- mouth:
i take my airbrush hard round and the lightest skintone. i highlight the area where the lower lip would be and draw it in, because most manga doesnt have a defined lower lip.
- now take the second lightest skintone and do the same for the upper lip. you want to make sure that your lines are clean and defined, you dont want it to look fuzzy. if your airbrush isnt working for you here you can just switch to a hard round.
- after you've defined the top lip, take the lightest skintone again and switch to a hard round brush, size 5. draw a very thin highlight above the defined upper lip. it should distinguish the lip area from the rest of the face and keep in line with our highlighting habit.
- nose:
airbrush hard round + second lightest skintone. shade in the underside/nostrils of the nose. i usually skip shading the bridge but i did it here to show you how it'd look if i was gonna bother with it
- give that bitch some highlights. i do the underside and the bridge.
- eyes:
airbrush hardround + second lightest skintone. shade dark around the eyes to give them a more sunken sockety feeling. dont overwork it.
- take your lightest skintone color again and highlight the lower eyelid. this will give the very ghetto effect of raised eyelids, but not too overworked, which would ruin the simple style.
aand thats about all the work we do on the face. i knoooow.
if you want to go through and add a little extra detail to the skintone on the rest of the body, go ahead. i just try to keep in mind the simple nature of the coloring when i add more details to anything other than the face, as it can get very cluttery. this coloring is designed to be resized down to a 100x100 square, so extra details/noise can actually detract from the final product. if you're planning on keeping it the original size, you can use your best judgment about where/when more detail is needed
______
HAIR:
ssss k this is one of my least favorite parts so i tend to rush it. first, make sure you have a palette. you need at minimum 2 different colors, not just two shades of the same color.
we're going to bust out the gradients again, so get your soft brush.
i'm going to use nill's hair for this, because naoto's is matte black for the most part and that is Good Enough for me.
- you should already have a base hair color (the darkest in this case), but if you don't, block it in now
- select your second lightest color and start filling in areas where light would hit it with the soft brush the same as we did for skintone. the crown and the body most likely.
- select another color that has nothing to do with your hair color but you think would compliment it. i usually go with red for blonde and blue for brown.
- color the tips of the hair with it. make sure its kind of subtle and not like HEY IM RED LOOK AT ME. the point is to make it blend from one color to another, so if your gradients are choppy redo it.
in the end you should have something like this
that's our base color/shade.
- now choose a lighter shade of the original hair color, not the tip color. for nill i went with a really light beige to keep in line with her blonde hair.
- you're going to streak her hair on the edges with the light color with a hard round brush. DONT TALK TO ME ABOUT HOW THATS NOT HOW LIGHT HITS HAIR I KNOW THAT. i do want i want. so we're going to strand this hair up with some highlights.
k now that it looks all glossy and completely unrealistic.
- switch to your highlights layer, the one on top of your lineart. remember that unloved thing up top that we haven't touched yeah we're going to that.
- select your BASE HAIR COLOR. not the highlight, or the tip color, we want the shade thats covering the majority of her hair.
- now, using a hard round brush, draw in individual strands that overlap the lineart. we want to break up some of that gradient because it makes her hair look like a pillow.
from her position her hair will probably be a little messed up, so im gonna go crazy drawing little strands everywhere. im not usually so overzealous but dinky hairs are cute.
now scribble on a few stylistic dots for highlights and add a streak of light to the crown.
laaa. hair is done.
______
CLOTHES:
definitely my least favorite part and the most hurried. pick your palette, get your soft round airbrush, we're gradienting it.
- hopefully you separated your clothing colors out when blocking them out earlier, cus itll come in handy now. ill do her shirt first.
- use the softround brush to gradient it. dont do it in the center, do it off center like on the edge somewhere. if you do it in the center itll look like she's wearing a giant pillow.
yaay, cheap dynamic coloring.
- now take your detail airbrush and use the lighter of the shades you used in the gradient to lighten up the edges and wrinkles on the clothing. i dont spend too much time here because overworking clothes can really fuck over the whole thing.
yaay, lazily colored clothes.
for clothes that you want to add more detail to, map out the areas you want defined with circular gradients, then switch to your airbrush to add detail, just like skintone.
using more than one color on a piece of clothing can give the impression of different types of fabric. i usually try to incorporate at least two different colors into clothing i want to detail.
of course itd be the panties.
rinse & repeat for the rest of the clothing.
______
FINISHING TOUCHES:
pretty much done up in here.
back to the highlights layer on top,
- add white strips to the eyes to mimic reflecting light. make sure it overlaps the iris or it wont be noticeable.
- add a light ring around the pupil.
now you're done coloring and you can add the last step, which i add to all of my icons,
a curve layer:
(layer -> new adjustment layer -> curves...)
and a gray screen layer:
(layer -> new fill layer -> solid color -> #4a4747)
set the screen layer to "lighten". i usually lower the opacity to 69%. you can play with it. this will lighten/soften up the lineart.
end result:
______
SETUP:
whip your image out. we're tutorialing with naoto and nill today. i'm using ps..cs2? in this? (it's been a while and i can't remember what it was sorry!)
in your prep make sure that you erase screentones! you can do it without erasing them, but itll make it look worse. sometimes im lazy and i dont do this, but i always like the end result when i have very clean lineart. if you want to keep them as guidelines for shading (it helps sometimes), duplicate the lineart layer and save the original screentones but keep it invisible until you need it for reference.
make sure your blacks are true black and your white isnt grungy. dingy blacks will result in color bleedover. you can use levels to make your whites white and your blacks blacker.
first separate the lineart from the background:
- set to grayscale
- duplicate the layer
- erase the layer that is now the background so that it's white
- set the lineart to Multiply
- set back to RGB
now:
- make a folder in between the white background and the lineart
- create a bunch of new empty layers in the folder
- make an empty layer above the lineart for highlights
your layers should look like sth this:
i've made an action to do all this shit for me by now, which makes setup a lot faster.
palette:
- make sure you have color swatches set up for ease of use. i use three colors for my skintone, a cream color that i use for whites, and a dark grey/brown that i use for blacks. any other frequently used colors like hair tones should be on your palette as well.
protip: don't use a shade of white for the eyes, use an off-white that looks white in the context of the image. pure white in the eyes is usually too glaring.
my palette:
______
BASE COLORS:
- use a hard round brush, paintbucket or magic wand to block in your base colors.
- use the darkest color range of your skin palette when you block in the skin. we'll color darkest to lightest so it'll come in handy later. yes they look like ganguro girls now. idc.
- !important! make sure you block in all the large areas of clothing separately. for ease of coloring later, youll want separate layers for each article.
- make sure you lock your transparent pixels on each layer after you block in the color. it will make shading much easier.
______
GRADIENTS:
k now we actually start coloring. i usually start with the skin because it's my favorite.
- take a soft round brush that's about the circumfrence of the face.
- pick up your mid-range skintone ( you should have at least three: dark (shadows), midrange, and light (highlights) ) and start laying down a base gradient on the face:
this is done by applying color in the center of the face only. the brush should cover it in a circular area so that only the edges remain darkish.
- pick the lightest skintone and lay another gradient on top of that. this should make the face your "base color" or lightest skintone for the majority of the surface area, with gradually darkening edges.
- now lay down this base gradient on every part of your skintone. it doesn't even have to make sense as far as light sources go this is not professional coloring this is sparta.
just keep in mind when gradienting arms and legs that theyre cylindrical, so lay down the brush in the center and make sure there's dark on either side so that it gives the effect of a shaded tube. i am sure you know this.
now we have this really crudely done skintone, no accounting for shadows and no shading, just the base.
______
SHADING AND DETAILS:
ook now comes the detail work such as it is. zoom back in on dat face and lets go.
- choose your airbrush hard round. i use this for detail work at all times unless i have to work on something extremely small and precise. it makes the colors blend more smooth and compliments the gradient base well.
- first things first, i take the lightest skintone and outline the face, ears, and edges of the body (neck, fingers, tits, legs, etc.). no accounting for lighting because fuck that noise, these bitches are backlit 24/7 with their own personal lightsource.
so lets get to highlighting:
k that cheap lil trick has put us in business and its looking better. next is shading of the face.
- mouth:
i take my airbrush hard round and the lightest skintone. i highlight the area where the lower lip would be and draw it in, because most manga doesnt have a defined lower lip.
- now take the second lightest skintone and do the same for the upper lip. you want to make sure that your lines are clean and defined, you dont want it to look fuzzy. if your airbrush isnt working for you here you can just switch to a hard round.
- after you've defined the top lip, take the lightest skintone again and switch to a hard round brush, size 5. draw a very thin highlight above the defined upper lip. it should distinguish the lip area from the rest of the face and keep in line with our highlighting habit.
- nose:
airbrush hard round + second lightest skintone. shade in the underside/nostrils of the nose. i usually skip shading the bridge but i did it here to show you how it'd look if i was gonna bother with it
- give that bitch some highlights. i do the underside and the bridge.
- eyes:
airbrush hardround + second lightest skintone. shade dark around the eyes to give them a more sunken sockety feeling. dont overwork it.
- take your lightest skintone color again and highlight the lower eyelid. this will give the very ghetto effect of raised eyelids, but not too overworked, which would ruin the simple style.
aand thats about all the work we do on the face. i knoooow.
if you want to go through and add a little extra detail to the skintone on the rest of the body, go ahead. i just try to keep in mind the simple nature of the coloring when i add more details to anything other than the face, as it can get very cluttery. this coloring is designed to be resized down to a 100x100 square, so extra details/noise can actually detract from the final product. if you're planning on keeping it the original size, you can use your best judgment about where/when more detail is needed
______
HAIR:
ssss k this is one of my least favorite parts so i tend to rush it. first, make sure you have a palette. you need at minimum 2 different colors, not just two shades of the same color.
we're going to bust out the gradients again, so get your soft brush.
i'm going to use nill's hair for this, because naoto's is matte black for the most part and that is Good Enough for me.
- you should already have a base hair color (the darkest in this case), but if you don't, block it in now
- select your second lightest color and start filling in areas where light would hit it with the soft brush the same as we did for skintone. the crown and the body most likely.
- select another color that has nothing to do with your hair color but you think would compliment it. i usually go with red for blonde and blue for brown.
- color the tips of the hair with it. make sure its kind of subtle and not like HEY IM RED LOOK AT ME. the point is to make it blend from one color to another, so if your gradients are choppy redo it.
in the end you should have something like this
that's our base color/shade.
- now choose a lighter shade of the original hair color, not the tip color. for nill i went with a really light beige to keep in line with her blonde hair.
- you're going to streak her hair on the edges with the light color with a hard round brush. DONT TALK TO ME ABOUT HOW THATS NOT HOW LIGHT HITS HAIR I KNOW THAT. i do want i want. so we're going to strand this hair up with some highlights.
k now that it looks all glossy and completely unrealistic.
- switch to your highlights layer, the one on top of your lineart. remember that unloved thing up top that we haven't touched yeah we're going to that.
- select your BASE HAIR COLOR. not the highlight, or the tip color, we want the shade thats covering the majority of her hair.
- now, using a hard round brush, draw in individual strands that overlap the lineart. we want to break up some of that gradient because it makes her hair look like a pillow.
from her position her hair will probably be a little messed up, so im gonna go crazy drawing little strands everywhere. im not usually so overzealous but dinky hairs are cute.
now scribble on a few stylistic dots for highlights and add a streak of light to the crown.
laaa. hair is done.
______
CLOTHES:
definitely my least favorite part and the most hurried. pick your palette, get your soft round airbrush, we're gradienting it.
- hopefully you separated your clothing colors out when blocking them out earlier, cus itll come in handy now. ill do her shirt first.
- use the softround brush to gradient it. dont do it in the center, do it off center like on the edge somewhere. if you do it in the center itll look like she's wearing a giant pillow.
yaay, cheap dynamic coloring.
- now take your detail airbrush and use the lighter of the shades you used in the gradient to lighten up the edges and wrinkles on the clothing. i dont spend too much time here because overworking clothes can really fuck over the whole thing.
yaay, lazily colored clothes.
for clothes that you want to add more detail to, map out the areas you want defined with circular gradients, then switch to your airbrush to add detail, just like skintone.
using more than one color on a piece of clothing can give the impression of different types of fabric. i usually try to incorporate at least two different colors into clothing i want to detail.
of course itd be the panties.
rinse & repeat for the rest of the clothing.
______
FINISHING TOUCHES:
pretty much done up in here.
back to the highlights layer on top,
- add white strips to the eyes to mimic reflecting light. make sure it overlaps the iris or it wont be noticeable.
- add a light ring around the pupil.
now you're done coloring and you can add the last step, which i add to all of my icons,
a curve layer:
(layer -> new adjustment layer -> curves...)
and a gray screen layer:
(layer -> new fill layer -> solid color -> #4a4747)
set the screen layer to "lighten". i usually lower the opacity to 69%. you can play with it. this will lighten/soften up the lineart.
end result: