#digital coloring tutorial

Ok since a lot of you have been asking me my coloring process but don´t come to my live streams Im going to give you guys a not super specific coloring process with a bunch of screenshots 

Okay first of all you get your  line art, I don´t use black as as ur line art color I usually use a dark brown or red they are better for blending with skin colors!

Then I have a layer for the base color, like the most important one, I usually color skin first so. For the crocodile I first used a normal green color and then blended a darker one from the bottom to the top so it didnt look too flat and boring and then with a lighter green i did some simple details in his skin. Same with the character´s skin tone I used a little darker one with a more redish tone to give her some simple shadows and avoid flat boring colors.

Then I add the a second layer for hair or clothing. With hair I do the same thing I did with the crocodile skin, I use a base color and then I pick one a little darker and blend it from bottom to the top 

Now for shadow, DONT USE BLACK, It is way better if you use a blue, a brown, a red or a purple. I usually use dark purples or reds. Create another layer on top of all the layers except line art and put the shadow color on the places I want the shadow to be.

next I turn the Shadow layer opacity down to about a 35 or a 40 percent, tbh it depends on how I want it to look.

Sometimes I leave it like that , buuuut sometimes i like to add another layer on top of shadow, it is like a color light that just gives it a cool effect and gives you more color scheme variety. In this case I used a light blue to give it a some water underneath vibe and a pastel pink/orange to give a sunset effect, but not on all the drawing but in the parts I want that light to be

Tbh now that I am looking at it I could have not turned down opacity it looked cool that way lmao, mistakes were made, but who cares anyways I turned the layers opacity to like a 50 to make it blend better with the base colors (It still looks cool nvrm)

And then I added a background that simulated the light layer colors to make a better composition and also added some wobbly palm shadows cause I dind´t want it to take much attention from the characters. Also at the end I usually like to add some little white lines around certain parts of the line art to make some stuff POP ya know? like in parts where things blend too much and you can get confused so ye TA DAH final product!

I got a drawing of chibi version for my char, Rus, to play with variations on finishing and coloring a drawing. I wanted a simple way to switch between black and white and color versions of the same drawing.

This is very simple, you need only to play with layers and its Combine modes. For this I used MangaStudio 5 Ex, but I think that any painting software, that is able to work with layers, can be used.

In this example, versions like Lineart only (good for black & white comics and internal book illustrations), Cell Shading, Soft Cell Shading, and Realistic Shading.

Let's go to the steps used in each type:

First I made the sketch of the drawing, with blue color and a lighter Pencil. For the lineart I created a Vector layer, and with Continuous Curve tool with brush size of 3.0, I draw all the lines of the art. The layer was called "lineart mono". Then I made a copy of this layer and hide it, the new layer is called "final lineart", and with the Correct Line Width tool I changed manually the width of each part of the lines, trying to give to it a hand drawed look. The heavy black spots were made in a separate Raster Layer below the lineart layer.

The background is a layer filled with medium gray.

The flat color layer was created in an easy way: the final artwork and black layers are hidden, and the "lineart mono" is visible and selected. With the Auto Select Tool I seleted each area of a particular color. Then selected the color, the color layer and filled the area with the Fill Tool. Made it for each color of the drawing.

The light gray used for filling was easier to create: with the color layer selected, Layer->Selection from Layer->Create Selection, then created a new layer and fill the selection with a light gray.

The shadows, no matter what type, are created in Raster Layers, with Expression Color set to Gray (to ensure that it will be real grayscale) and Combine mode set to Multiply, above the color layer. The I used the techniques for cell or realistic style. For Cell Shading, Lasso Marquee and the Marker, with a light gray, to create the shadow areas. For the realistic, I used the Airbrush Tool with different shades of gray.

The highlights is the same, but the layer has the Combine Mode set to Soft Light.