Berri Colourful

Step One: Stare at the Lineart

This is really important. Do not bother proceeding if you don’t understand your lineart. Your shading will only look sloppy and confused if you aren’t on top of it and consistent. For example: In the Hori lineart, understand that the lines of her shirt are wrinkles. They should all give off some sort of shadow. I’m not colouring her shirt to be satin, so there will be no bright highlights. Her skin might reflect light, so I will be adding shadows and highlights. Her hair will be a fun nightmare, but I understand that those lines show the direction that her hair flows from her scalp.

Now that you’ve thought about it, let’s start colouring.

Step Two: Basic Shading

We’ll start with her shirt, because it’s the most basic. Create a new layer over the shirt layer and pick a darker colour. When shading white, you probably want something blue-ish rather than black or grey. Take your pen and, well... Shade. Go crazy. You can go outside of the “shirt lines.” We’ll clean it up.

There are three ways to clean the shading that went off the shirt. I’ll go from easiest to most time consuming.

One: Layer Clipping

If you program has layer clipping, use it! You hit a button in the layer section and the top layer “clips” to the one below it, as signified by that red line. This means that the colouring you do on the top layer follows the opacity of the layer below it. In other words, you can’t colour off the shirt flats.

Two: Select & Clear

If you don’t have layer clipping, use your magic wand to select the space outside of the shirt on the shirt layer. With the selection intact, go to the shading layer and just clear the shading within your outer selection. If you don’t have a magic “clear selection” button then use your eraser.

Three: Eraser the outside colouring manually

Grab your eraser and do your best.

Optionally, you may want to blend the shading. I think doing this because I like the look of it, but if you don’t like the look then more power to you. I finish blending the edges, then duplicate the shaded layer and multiply it. This helps it to contrast the white more strongly. Now I’m happy with the shirt, so I’m going to do the same steps for her skin.

Step Three: Face Specific Magic

I performed the exact same steps here. I did a base shading, smoothed it out with my blurr tool, and then multiplied it. I’ve circled some key parts of the face that some people miss.

The lines above her eyes are her eyelid folds. I give these light shading. Her ears are heavily detailed, but when you resize it the tiny details will be lost. So I don’t worry about the interior; I just shade it all one colour. She has hair that falls over her face, so I do a very light shadow. I shade the sides of her face to make them rounder. You can so specific shading to define the cheekbones however you want.

I put a very small and messy shading under her mouth to define her lips. I also shade the “top” of her collarbone, where it is sunken in. I use the screentones as a guide, but I shade a bit outside of them as well.

Next up, blush & glowing.

I like to add blush to all of the faces in varying opacity. It gives the character the look of someone who is alive and not a vampire. For your vampire faces, you don’t need this.

I start by making a new layer. I pick a shade of red and put a dot on either cheek, then set the layer to “multiply.” I grab my blending tool and blend around the cheeks like I’m applying make-up. On the right side, the manga lineart had a blush drawn in. I go to my lineart layer and erase it. Once the blush it added, I make yet another layer and change my pen colour to white. I add six white dots: Two on either cheek, one on her nose, and one on the top of her lip. I used the blend tool on the nose and lip dots, but left the cheeks solid.

If the character has a big forehead, I will sometimes add a bit of blush to the forehead, but with no white dots. If they are actually blushing from embarrassment, I’ll add some red to their ears as well. No white dots here either.

Step Four: Eyes

This is how I  do the eyes for my art, specifically Horimiya art. Experiment with your own styles! Look at the artists you like and copy them! That’s how you learn and develop your own style.

First, make a new layer over the skin but under the hair, and paint the whites of the eyes. Create a second layer and colour the eyes. Because of the lineart, parts of the eyes are covered by black. That’s fine. Pick a light colour for this step.

Our third layer will go above the lineart. Pick a darker colour and colour the entire eye. Then set your top layer to screen. This will cause it to only show up on the black parts of your drawing, not the white. If you like the eyes as they are now, no need to continue as I get more insane.

If you decide to continue onward...

You’ll make a forth layer and colour with your lighter eye colour. I cover the part of the eye that was visible through the lineart. Then I used the blend tool to soften it. At this point, I also went back to the third layer and turned the screen back to normal. I was only using the screen so that I could see under the layer. I then created a fifth layer, and drew an arced white line on the gap between the two eye colours. Finally, I made a sixth layer, and drew the white shines. With an even darker shade, I drew two pupils and blended them.

I’ve now finished my eyes!

The next tutorial will cover hair in my style. My style makes the hair the most complicated part. Otherwise, just colour your hair like you did the rest of the shading. It’s really up to you.

Either way... Take a break and rejoice.

Step One: Background Colour

Why is this step one? Because your background colour can hide mistakes! No joke. I like to be lazy. [ rant ]If you have a light background then sometimes you can colour a bit out of the lines and it doesn’t show. If you have a dark background then the contrast might make your mistakes pop. Rather than picking your background to suit your lazy level, just keep in mind how best to colour with your favorite background. [ /rant ]

And so~

Make a new layer and drag it under your lineart. Then use your fill tool to make that layer entirely your background colour. Go to your lineart, select “Multiply” and bam!

You’ve basically turned your manga scan into a colouring book. Now anytime that you want to colour something, you just make a new layer to colour on and stick it between the “lineart” and the “background.”

A lot of you can probably take it from here. It’s basically the same as colouring any other digital picture from this point onwards.

If you want to know how I lazily colour icons and learn my short cuts, continue!

Step Two: Obnoxious Flats

I call them obnoxious flats because this is going to be an eye sore for a while.

Okay, Point One: Pen vs Pencil. For me, my pencil is a very soft tool. For this stage of colouring, you want the more crisp and sharp of your colouring tools. Make a new layout and begin outling the first part of your colouring. Don’t worry about going out of the lines yet! Use a really obnoxious colour that stands out. This will help you see where you fall out of the lines and any parts you miss.

Once you have the outline done, fill once or twice. Go back through with the pen to catch any parts you missed. With used a bright colour so these mistakes would stand out. I’ve circled two that were in my fill.

Next, we’re going to address the parts where we went out of the lines:

It’s important at this stage to get an idea of layer order. For me, hair is almost always the very top layer (I think of it as putting a wig on at the very end of cosplay.) Your top layers need to be the most precise. My skin layer is on the bottom, so I’m very very precise. But because hair is on top, we want everything to stay within the linesish.

I’ve circled a few of my mistakes. With my eraser, I’ll go through and clean those up.

Do this for every part of the drawing. 1) Make a new layer, 2) Pick a new wild colour, 3) Outline, 4) Fill, 5) Clean up. Don’t worry about the eyes or mouth just yet. If you have finer details, like markings on the clothes, hold off on those too.

Eventually, you get this monster:

Hori-san, you’re so... bright!!!

Step Three: Acceptable Flats

Next, pick your real colours. Fill over the obnoxious colours to make “acceptable flats.”

If you have the option with your paint program,use the opacity lock. It might not look exactly like this icon. What it does is make it impossible to put colour anywhere that colour does not already exist. Some fill tools will be + 1 or 2 pixels outside the original space, but this prevents that from happening.

Step One: The Painting Program!

This has been resized, so let me just go over the basics. You can use any program that you want. These are the important components that I use to colour my icons. If your program has them then nothing else matters.

Most Important: Layers ( plus filters & opacity control ), Selection Box, Pen/Pencil (something to draw with), Eraser.

Optional: Gradient, Blur Tool, Magic Wand

Once you have a paint program that can do or mimic these things, we’re ready to go on!

Step Two: Get Your Manga Scan!

Referring to the Step One photo, you will need a panel to colour. Please don’t be threatened by things like text bubbles or floating text. Select the biggest selection that you can. In the above picture, I turned my selection pink so that you could see it. Copy that and then paste it into a brand new file.

You want this to be as big as possible. The idea is that if you paint on a big canvas and then resize it smaller, a lot of the little imperfections go away. I typically time myself at 20 minutes to 1 hour per scan, so I don’t have time to fuss over details.

If it helps, resize your smaller picture to twice its size before you begin. Before starting to colour, resize your raw scan down to the size it will eventually be: If the lines look acceptable, then continue! Do this first so that you don’t paint the resized scan and then find out it didn’t look good when sized down again. This step isn’t necessary for all colourings, but can be used as training wheels when you start!

Step Three: Cleaning Your Scan

Like I said previously, please do not worry about text bubbles and such. We’re going to remove them now!

There is no magic to this step. Create a new layer and colour the text bubble with your pen (colour: white to match the scan.) Next, make a second layer, turn your pen black, and roughly draw the missing parts. Don’t worry if it “looks bad!” You’re learning! Once we resize the scan for icons, it’s going to look much better anyway. I have a super shaky hand, but the resizing makes it less noticable.

Once you’re done merge all layers.

Lastly, some scans have some “fuzz” around the scans from being saved in jpeg. It’s not the end of the world, but I don’t like it personally. To get rid of it quickly, duplicate your layer and then set the layer filter to “overlay.” This is going to make your black/white lines pop out. The lines will look crisper and we’ll be able to pretend we had high quality scans.

If you resized a scan to be bigger, this step can help your resize look cleaner.

And we’re done!