#color swap tutorial

For starters: I do use Krita for all of my edits including the color swaps! There may be different techniques for different programs, so keep in mind you may have to use a slightly different method for your program!

First you’ll wanna open your sprites! I usually keep both my sprites in their own tabs but it won’t hurt to put the sprites together! I’ll be putting them together for this!

Now for the fun part! The recoloring! I use the color picker to chose the color I need, in this case, Kokichi’s hair color! I’ll do a new layer on top of Nagito’s sprite and rename it to what it’s gonna be so I won’t get confused later!

After that, I’ll apply a mode to the layer (Either color, multiply, soft light, etc, etc,)! For this part, Nagito’s hair is white while Kokichi’s is purply-black, So I’ll use Multiply!After you apply the mode, start coloring! I usually just straight up color it in like a coloring book, but if you know of an easier way then go ahead and try it!

(Let’s pretend that’s all colored in ;0) Now let’s do his eyes! Create a new layer for Nagito and rename it to your liking before making the layer mode Color! Then color pick Kokichi’s eyes for the color and color in Nagito’s eyes!

Hmmm Those are a bit bright compared to Kokichi’s actual eyes! Let’s darken them a bit! Right click on the layer and click “Duplicate” and set the new duplicated layer to the mode soft light! Then turn on Alpha lock (On Krita it is checkered square on the side of the layer), change your color to black, and draw over the eyes again!

Better! I normally do one sprite at a time, but for the sake of this tutorial, let’s move over to Kokichi to talk about other techniques! Whenever you shift focus to another sprite, hide the layers (Usually it’s the little eyeball!) that you used on the first sprite so you can color pick the colors you need!

Uh oh! Problem! We color picked Nagito’s hair color, and tried setting the layer mode to Color, but Kokichi’s hair is just turning black! Multiply doesn’t work either! Soft Light makes his hair lighter, but it’s still purple!There are a couple different ways that we can do this though!1. We can just redraw his hair and color/shade it in without having to use filters.2.We can color in using the Screen layer mode, being careful to avoid the lines in his hair (Screen mode will lighten the lines unlike the other modes, and if using a color close to white, will require the opacity being turned down so you can see the texture underneath).3. We can use a Color layer and a couple Soft Light layers to obtain close to the right shade.What you use here will be completely up to you, and again, you might find a whole nother way that’s easier than any of these! For this in particular I’m gonna go with the option that seems the most annoying! Using multiple color and soft lights! I use this one most of the time! But using the screen option is similar so I will talk about it as well.

The easiest way to do this method is to do your Color layer first, duplicating it, and changing that layer to Soft Light. (Tip! Make your Color layer fully black or white, even if your color picked color is almost white, it’ll look better and be easier to work with if the Color layer is a true black or white!)

Still not bright enough? Keep duplicating the layers until you get what you need! (Tip! You can also dupe your Color layer that’s a true white, make it into Soft Light, and it should make it easier! Just make sure it’s below the layers that are of your color picked color!) Sidenote: if you went with the screen option here, you would’ve needed to put a white Color layer under your Screen layer and then lower the opacity of the Screen layer, but it would’ve turned out to only two layers as opposed to four with this method. Also if you used the screen option, you will need to follow this next step aswell!

Ok! This is close enough! But now my lines are all wonky(Lighter if used Screen)! Well we can fix that!Make sure you’re on your top layer and switch to your erase tool! Make the brush size the size of your lines and erase where the lines are!

All better!

Now Nagito has a bit of brown on the bottom of his hair! How will we do that?Simple! We’ll use the gradient tool! I won’t be able to show you on sprites since I didn’t color that low, but using the tool is super easy I think you’ll be able to get it just with text!First color pick the brown color of Nagito’s hair and make sure you’re on the top layer and that it is alpha locked! Then drag from the bottom of the hair up to a little bit above Kokichi’s eyes with the gradient tool. When you let go of the mouse, a gradient will pop up there! Continue the steps until you get the amount of brown you want!