Callie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
calliope_love) wrote2011-03-18 08:13 pm
calliope_love) wrote2011-03-18 08:13 pm
Entry tags:
Coloring Tutorial. Part II
Forward oooooon~
The next thing I like to do is the eye, because it's my second-favorite part -- once you've got it done, you really know who all you're coloring. In Break's case, I like to make the eye dark dark dark. He has all that hair hanging down around it, after all.
I use the same light blue as I did for the hair, with a bit of a dark blue-gray over that, for the white. I used a middle-shade of red for the flat, so I use a darker shade and a bit of burn on top, with a bit of lighter red down at the bottom of the curve. Please note that I can't be assed to know what the html for these are -- I am a creature of habit and process, and once I have a color I like, it goes in the custom swatch holder and it bloody well stays there and I use it over and over again without thinking about it.
Then I make a new layer that sits on top of all the other ones. This is the one layer that is going to stay in "normal" mode. Back onto the pencil tool, I add a few shines.
Then, back to the smudge tool, to de-pixelify.
Now we've got some life in that bloody red eye. This is the part where Calliope pauses to have what is called an "artgasm".
Next, face-shading. The first thing I do is find which layer I actually put the skin flats on, because damned if I can be bothered to label these suckers. Then, I left-click on the little thumbnail for the layer and choose "select layer transparency". This will select all the color patches on this layer, so you can scribble freely without going outside of the lines and needing to clean up later.
Actually, I lied. I hold down the apple key and click on the thumbnail, selecting the layer that way instead of left-clicking. Because I have a Mac and I loves me some key-commands. They speed my process up considerably. Obviously art is something that needs time and love, but once you've figured out how to love it, nobody ever said you couldn't learn to love it more efficiently.
Now the shading starts. I basically just use variations on the flat shade. If I were going to be properly artistic I'd be doing artistic things like shading skin with purple and highlighting it with very light green, but as it is, I am coloring manga panels for icons, so here we are.
I do, however, use multiple different colors to shade. Second-darkest, first. Again, because it's Break, I pay particular attention to darkening things around his hair -- the whole point of it is that it falls in his face.
Darkest shade.
A bit of highlighting.
A bit of burn tool. It took a lot of experimentation to get the colors I use for skin to be compatible with burn; some colors are abysmal with it. In case you were wondering, I keep my tools on the same settings most of the time, except for switching the brush from hard/100% to soft/40% when I go from flats to shading.
Tidy up a bit -- fix a couple places where I missed with the flat, smooth out some blendy bits, etc -- and we've got the skin colored.
I didn't take any screenshots of it because that part is too nitpicky for it and the changes are so small you barely notice them, but when I say "smooth out some blendy bits", what I mean is that in some places I like to make the transitions between shades smoother. I do this by using the eyedropper tool to pick up colors in the surrounding area.
Take these two images. On the first one, the darker shades are fine, but I think there's too much of a jump between the light and the middle. So I pick up the middle shade with the eyedropper, and with my 40% soft brush, smooth that transition out. This is the sort of thing you do when you've been doing this so long that tiny things most other people would not notice make you crazy.
The rest of the shading is done on the same principle. I leave things like his jacket and such alone -- the shading for those is already there, and adding the dark gray for the flats already brought out enough color. I also altered the shading on his face a bit, because I'm the artist and I said so.
Third and final part forthcoming.
The next thing I like to do is the eye, because it's my second-favorite part -- once you've got it done, you really know who all you're coloring. In Break's case, I like to make the eye dark dark dark. He has all that hair hanging down around it, after all.
I use the same light blue as I did for the hair, with a bit of a dark blue-gray over that, for the white. I used a middle-shade of red for the flat, so I use a darker shade and a bit of burn on top, with a bit of lighter red down at the bottom of the curve. Please note that I can't be assed to know what the html for these are -- I am a creature of habit and process, and once I have a color I like, it goes in the custom swatch holder and it bloody well stays there and I use it over and over again without thinking about it.
Then I make a new layer that sits on top of all the other ones. This is the one layer that is going to stay in "normal" mode. Back onto the pencil tool, I add a few shines.
Then, back to the smudge tool, to de-pixelify.
Now we've got some life in that bloody red eye. This is the part where Calliope pauses to have what is called an "artgasm".
Next, face-shading. The first thing I do is find which layer I actually put the skin flats on, because damned if I can be bothered to label these suckers. Then, I left-click on the little thumbnail for the layer and choose "select layer transparency". This will select all the color patches on this layer, so you can scribble freely without going outside of the lines and needing to clean up later.
Actually, I lied. I hold down the apple key and click on the thumbnail, selecting the layer that way instead of left-clicking. Because I have a Mac and I loves me some key-commands. They speed my process up considerably. Obviously art is something that needs time and love, but once you've figured out how to love it, nobody ever said you couldn't learn to love it more efficiently.
Now the shading starts. I basically just use variations on the flat shade. If I were going to be properly artistic I'd be doing artistic things like shading skin with purple and highlighting it with very light green, but as it is, I am coloring manga panels for icons, so here we are.
I do, however, use multiple different colors to shade. Second-darkest, first. Again, because it's Break, I pay particular attention to darkening things around his hair -- the whole point of it is that it falls in his face.
Darkest shade.
A bit of highlighting.
A bit of burn tool. It took a lot of experimentation to get the colors I use for skin to be compatible with burn; some colors are abysmal with it. In case you were wondering, I keep my tools on the same settings most of the time, except for switching the brush from hard/100% to soft/40% when I go from flats to shading.
Tidy up a bit -- fix a couple places where I missed with the flat, smooth out some blendy bits, etc -- and we've got the skin colored.
I didn't take any screenshots of it because that part is too nitpicky for it and the changes are so small you barely notice them, but when I say "smooth out some blendy bits", what I mean is that in some places I like to make the transitions between shades smoother. I do this by using the eyedropper tool to pick up colors in the surrounding area.
Take these two images. On the first one, the darker shades are fine, but I think there's too much of a jump between the light and the middle. So I pick up the middle shade with the eyedropper, and with my 40% soft brush, smooth that transition out. This is the sort of thing you do when you've been doing this so long that tiny things most other people would not notice make you crazy.
The rest of the shading is done on the same principle. I leave things like his jacket and such alone -- the shading for those is already there, and adding the dark gray for the flats already brought out enough color. I also altered the shading on his face a bit, because I'm the artist and I said so.
Third and final part forthcoming.