A few months ago, I wrote a tutorial on how to color in Photoshop for the blog portion of my comic Draw Write Play. I broke it down into 3 parts so that the post won’t be too long but now that I’ve discovered how to break blog posts, I thought I’d repost the entire tutorial here all in a single post. This is the first tutorial that I’ve ever written, and therefore is not my best piece of work but I hope it will still be useful. I used my sketch of Zuko for this tutorial. You can see the finished colors below.

 

Before we start, this tutorial assumes that you have a basic understanding of Photoshop and it’s workspace. Essentially, you should know where the tools and windows are located, what blending modes are, how layers work and what each tool is for. If you’re not familiar with Photoshop’s workspace I suggest reading the Photoshop Help file. Honestly, a lot of people tend to neglect the Photoshop Help file but it has tons of information that can help you work faster and more efficiently. I still use it when I get stuck or if I can’t remember what a certain blending mode is for.

Tools needed:

1. Adobe Photoshop - duh. This tutorial is How to Color in Photoshop.
2. Wacom Tablet - recommended but not necessary. I highly recommend that you get a tablet if you want to take coloring in Photoshop seriously. A mouse just does not compare with the feeling of actually using a pen to paint/color. A Wacom Graphire 3 or 4 will do but if you have money to blow, then get a Wacom Intuos 3, it’s the best in the line so far.
3. Patience - don’t give up if you can’t get what I’m saying. Just email or drop in a comment if you have questions.

Step 1 – Preparo! (Also known as prepping the lineart for coloring)

Before you color anything in Photoshop, you have to prepare the lineart first for coloring. Now, some people would simply duplicate the lineart layer and set the layer to “Multiply” but what I do for most of my works is to create a layer with the lineart separated into it’s own layer. My reason for this is that setting a layer to “Multiply” simply disregards any white areas within that layer. If you want to color the actual lineart within that layer, you will have to manually select the areas you want to color, and you still won’t get the exact color you want.

The “Multiply” blending mode, by Adobe Helps’s own definition: “Looks at the color information in each channel and multiplies the base color by the blend color. The result color is always a darker color. Multiplying any color with black produces black. Multiplying any color with white leaves the color unchanged. When you’re painting with a color other than black or white, successive strokes with a painting tool produce progressively darker colors. The effect is similar to drawing on the image with multiple marking pens.”

Look at the difference between the two methods I mentioned:

 

So how do you separate the lineart into it’s own layer then? First go to the “Channels” window (this should be beside the “Layers” window in Photoshop’s default workspace). You will see four channels: RGB, Red, Green, and Blue. Press the CTRL key and left click on the RGB channel. This will select everything in your layer without color. Then press CTRL+SHIFT+I, this inverses your selection- essentially selecting everything in the layer with color.

 

Create a new layer on top of your original lineart layer. Press the “D” key to set your foreground and background colors to black and white respectively. Then press the “X” key to switch the colors so that your foreground color is white and your background color is black. On your new layer, press CTRL + Backspace, you should now have your lineart as a separate layer. The separated lineart should look like this.

 

Okay, that’s that for separating lineart. If you have any questions, suggestions, corrections, and the like, just drop me a comment.

Step 2 – Flatting

“Flatting” is essentially the process of laying out your basic colors into separate layers. For example, you might want to have a layer for the skin color, a layer for the hair color, and separate layers for the different colors of clothing. When I lay down my flats, I usually start from the bottom up, meaning whichever part of your drawing that is covered by something else (e.g. like skin, covered by clothing or background first, foreground second). You can start with whatever your feel like flatting first but I find it easier to do this because you don’t need to be as precise.

For example, the image below shows my layer for the skin color. Notice that the color bleeds into the hair and the clothing. This is alright because the hair layer and clothes layer will overlap the skin layer.

 

Now, before I start flatting my basic colors, I usually create one layer and fill it with a neutral color. This is so that the canvas is not so freakishly white. Your eyes will thank you in the long run.

You can use two tools in Photoshop to create selections for your flats, the Lasso tool and the Pen tool. The Lasso tool is more freeform and is recommended only when you’re using a pen tablet. Otherwise, use the Pen tool for making selections. The Lasso tool creates selections instantly, while the Pen tool will first make a “path” that you can modify and manipulate before making a selection. In general, selections made using the Pen tool are more precise than using the Lasso tool. It is also more time consuming but if you’re not in a hurry, I recommend using the Pen tool for cleaner selections.

When using the Lasso tool, use a 0 px (that’s zero pixels) Feather and check the anti-alias box. This will make sure that your selections have a nice smooth and non-pixelated finish. You can use the SHIFT and ALT keys in conjunction with the Lasso tool. The SHIFT lets you add to your selection and the ALT key lets you subtract from your selection. While pressing down with the Lasso tool you can also press the ALT key to change from a normal Lasso tool to a Polygonal Lasso tool. Releasing the ALT key will change your Polygonal Lasso tool back to the normal Lasso tool.

When using the Pen tool, you set a number of “anchor points” to define your path. When setting an anchor point, you can hold down the Pen tool and drag it to make curves. Holding down the ALT key and pressing the last anchor point you place will revert you back to setting straight paths. To close the path, simply click on the first anchor point you set. Pressing CTRL + ENTER will convert your path into a selection.

Flatting is basically CREATE LAYER > SELECT > FILL > CREATE LAYER > SELECT > FILL until you finish setting down all your basic colors. When your done Flatting, You should have something that looks like this:

 

If you turn off the Lineart layer you will have something like this:

 

Here’s a little peek at what my layers look like, notice that I labeled all my layers. This is very useful especially if you’re collaborating on a file and you want to let your partners know what each layer is for:

Step 3 – Painting

Before you start painting, you might want to group all your flat layers and duplicate the group. Rename the duplicate group to “Colors” or whatever you fancy and disable viewing your Flats group. The Flats layers will now act as backup in case you want to start coloring from scratch but still want to keep the colors you’ve already done. Before painting on your layers, it will be useful to “lock” the layer by pressing “/”. This is so that you will paint only in the parts where you’ve put done your flat colors.

This will probably be the part where I can give the least advice to, as painting is really a matter of personal choice. There are so many different styles that you can do when you’re coloring a piece. It’s really up to you what you want your work to look like in the end. The best way is to experiment with as many different styles as possible and stick with one that you’re comfortable with. You might want to go for simpler anime cel style colors, or you could go all out with smooth airbrushed like colors. Here’s a collection of some of my past experiments in coloring styles:

 

Whatever coloring style you choose, there are really only a few tips that I can provide:

• Have an idea where your light sources are. Is it from above like sunlight? Is it from a fireplace somewhere near your character? Or both? (That would be weird.)
• Study shapes. Look at how light hits certain objects and how they create shadows. If you’re coloring a face, know which areas are higher that can reflect more light, and deeper that creates more shadow. If you’re really stumped, use yourself as a model.
• Practice and experiment. I can’t stress this more. If you’re comfortable with only one style of coloring that’s up to you, but I try to experiment as much as possible, by mixing different colors, using colors I don’t normally use, using different brushes, etcetera.
• Stick to a few good brushes. Sometimes we get caught up with having to choose a brush to use, and there are hundreds to choose from in Photoshop’s default set alone. I personally stick to using only one brush, which I use both to sketch and color. It’s the default Photoshop brush (hard edged) with a 1% spacing in Brush Tip Shape, Size Jitter set to Pen Pressure under Shape Dynamics, and Opacity and Flow Jitter set to Pen Pressure under Other Dynamics. I also have Airbrush and Smoothing on. You can find all this in the brushes window.
• Play with layer styles. You can get really nifty effects from playing with layer styles. And they’re fairly easy to use and understand. Just double click on a layer and you’ll find a window with a list of styles that you can tweak to your liking. I tend to use “Stroke” too much because I just really like having nice big bold outlines on my characters.

Okay, so this might not be the perfect tutorial as I am still learning the craft of writing tutorials, but generally speaking, the best way to learn how to color is really to constantly practice and experiment. I’ve got a lot of cluttered Photoshop files in my hard drive, all of which I somehow came to name as Practice1, Practice2, etcetera. I’m not the perfect colorist/painter out there either and there are literally hundreds of artists better than me in this craft. Some of which have their own tutorials, too. If you have an artist whose skills you like, instead of sulking and wallowing in despair on how much better that artist is than you are, try to analyze his/her works instead, see what colors he/she uses, what brush strokes, what styles he/she employs that you can apply to your own work. Don’t just sit there and ogle at the beautiful colors, study them!

Anyway, I hope this tutorial helped you even just a tiny bit. If you have any questions and suggestions, just drop them in a comment. Or you can send me an email at iambibs (at) gmail (dot) com.

 

Comicology is created with the help of coffee. If you like Comicology, please consider buying the author a cup :D

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 6:05 pm and is filed under How Tos.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.