A bunch of folks have asked me how I color, and how I apply color. I’ve worked really hard to develop my coloring technique. I’ve studied photoshop, how other artists worked, blew up screen shots to see how other people were using layers, etc. At the end of the day, no amount of coloring will make up for shoddy draftsmanship, BUT, if you want me to pull back the curtain, here you are…
We start with a drawing. In my professional work, I use mostly traditional materials, but for the fanstuffs, it is more practical and cost effective for me to use the computer. I have developed three brushes I use exclusively for line work. I highly suggest creating your own line brush, so that your work is not homogenous with the work of other people who may be using a bought brush set. But, at the beginning, using a brush set and seeing how those brushes are built is not the worst thing.
is what the finished product looks like, but this…
…is what my screen shots will look like, because I use the dissolve filter on my brush and gradients to add a subtle texture. This renders oddly on-screen and took me a while to ignore. You don’t need to put that dissolve filter on there, but I like it.
To start: You should be working at 300 dpi at least. I work at 600 dpi at approximately 8 x 10″ or 6 x 10″ (for the “widescreen” stuff). I color in CMYK mode, because RGB renders modified layers in a far less subtle way, and also does not print reliably. It is easier to convert from CMYK color mode to RGB than the other way around. That said, I know digital painters that prefer RGB because it blends nicer. I’m not digitally painting here, so CMYK all the way.
Look at all those swatches! I’ve been building my swatch palette for years and years, and have kept saving it as I’ve switched computers, gotten married and had a kid. That swatch palette is almost 8 years old at this point. I highly suggest saving swatches as you go. I barely use the color picker now, I have so many goddamn swatches.
Now, see how nicely my layers are bundled? I do that for a reason…
Here is the piece with all of my layers unbundled and turned off except for my flat color layers. Holy Christ that’s a shitton of layers! That’s why I label all of my layers and group them into folders. I don’t have a million layer labeled “layer 1″, “layer 2″, etc. into infinity. Can you imagine coloring a comic page like that? I would kill myself.
At any rate, I start every piece by laying in my flats. I make a flat layer for every part of the drawing I want to delineate spatially, so I have a layer for the sky, the cliffs, the tree, those blasted elves and Rukhash and her branch in the FG.
Those modified layers are layers for lighting effects and shading. Every layer labeled “o” (”o1″, “o2″ etc.) are overlay layers. Every layer labeled “s” (”s1″,”s2″, etc.) are shadow layers set to “multiply”. Now, lets turn some modified layers on…
The “o1″ layers are usually a very dark gradient using the gradient tool set to a foreground > transparent fill. That way, I can control the cover of the gradient. I will usually hit this layer twice at two slightly different angles, so the coverage feels organic.
The dark color gives a richness to the washed out flats I usually use and provides a nice variation when I get to the cell shading…
The first shading layer is usually a gradient as well (I often skip this on a day lit sky). This adds some subtle variation in the shading.
On goes the cell shading. Rukhash is so dark skinned, I added a layer of highlight (set to overlay) to help bring out some detail in her shadows (this is called “reflective light” and I use this trick all over the goddamn place when I have a dark area that needs lightening).
For shading colors: go for colors, like blues or purples or, if you’re getting funky, greens or browns. I usually use the same-ish color for all the cell shaded layers. Sometimes i may pick something lighter if I am shading a very light color.
The final overlay layer provides a general lighting tone. Here, it warms up the non-shadow area. I actually laid in the gradient, then selected the shadow parts and deleted those so the shadows stayed purply.
Little extra lighting effects are their own layer (like shiny droplets of water, or bright eyes or, in this case, a sun burst). this I do over the inking layer so it tints the line work and helps to bring the black line work into the drawing more homogeneously. (I usually don’t take the time in my fan work to lock down the line art and color in sections of line to help things blend better. i save that for my profesh. illustration stuff, as it is a rabbit hole that, once gone down, can take hours.)
I will do my line art in two colors to make separating out overlapping lines easier. I will ink traditionally in two colors for this same purpose, so it makes sense to me to ink digitally this way.
And that’s it! I’ll save for web and upload at this point. I have my coloring down to such a science, that I can usually bang out colors in an hour or less, though this was a bit more complex, and too me closer to two to finish. Doing the art for my fan fic has actually made my professional work get much faster in the coloring stage, and I actually have a long standing web comic that I ink and color this way, because it is too labor intensive to do traditionally (believe me, I tried).
I hope this is helpful to folks! Keep making that fantastic fan arts out there! And if you make any art for my stories, dear god, please message me and let me know! I will post them here fo sho!
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