#asknimbus

"First, you're gonna need lineart. I do my lineart in all black first, and I section it into different layers. I find it's easier to add color to the lineart later, when it is sectioned into different layers like this. I keep the lineart colors here in the ref, for ease of access, and we will go over selecting those colors in just a bit.

When it comes to coloring the interior lines, I color almost every line that falls within the overall outline. So, for example, we'll go ahead and color Harekit's head, here. There are easier ways of coloring your lineart, but I prefer to do it by hand.

Now, we'll move onto Harekit's ears, which are on a separate layer. His ears have two colors: one for the ear flap itself, and another for his bunny floofs.

We now have Harekit's lines almost all colored, except for his mouth. To color the lineart, I lock the opacity of the lineart folder. You can also lock the opacity for individual layers, if you prefer.

With the opacity lock off, you're just going to color over your artwork. You have to lock your lineart layers in order to color the lineart specifically. For lineart inside of open mouths, I color match to the tongue and teeth. I just like the look of it more.

When you have your lineart on separate layers like this, it makes coloring it faster, because you can just swipe your pen over the whole thing without coloring lines you don't intend to. If you prefer to keep your lineart all on one layer, you could still color it this way, you'd just have to be more careful with your penstrokes.

When it comes to selecting the color of the lineart, I tend to eye drop from the darkest color (usually) of the cat's palette. So, Harekit's dark orange stripes, in this case. Once I have my color selected, I'm going to go up into my colorwheel.

This is where I start winging it.

Yellow wouldn't show up very well on his orange coat, so we're gonna go for red! I tend to stick with analogous colors, but I may experiment with different colors if the vibe is right. From here, I slide the value down a couple notches, and slide the saturation up! As you can see, the color I ended up with is quite close to the lineart color from his reference.

My rules change a bit when it comes to facial features. The outline of the eyes and mouth remain black, for a classically cartoony look; features like the eyebrows and muzzle lines keep the red lineart color, and his nose outline has a darker shade of the nose color itself. So, again, we slide the value down, and the saturation up.

Harekit has a secondary lineart color, which is this orange. I feel that it helps lighten up the lighter parts of his color palette--the cream colored fur of his neck and paws--this is, again, just me winging it, as I simply don't like the look of all-red lineart for him.

I switch up my own rules from time to time, like with Alpinepaw's eyebrows. His eyebrows match his nose color, instead of the rest of his lineart, so that they stand out better against the marking on his forehead.

Fogfreckle actually had his lineart color updated to a far more saturated blue somewhere around Moon 9, as I thought it looked much better and stood out more.