My first real attempt at coloring in Photoshop...

Highlander_77

This was for a draw-off over on Penciljack. The theme of the draw-off was "Draw the next Captain America". I chose to draw Thor as the next Cap, and I decided it should be colored so I could show the whole red, white & blue color scheme.

As you can see, the coloring job is pretty bad...but it's the best I could manage at this point, with my current knowledge of both Photoshop and coloring & lighting in general. I would definitely like to hear some critiques and suggestions as to what I could do to make this better, or at least do better the next time I try to color something.



I really had no clue what to do with the background either, as you can probably tell. But I didn't want to just leave it white...

It also looks somewhat "gritty" in some areas. That's because it's not inked. I just darkened up the pencils in Photoshop before coloring. It's obvious to me that for this sort of thing, I either need to improve my inking skills to the point where I'm comfortable inking this sort of drawing before scanning it, or I need to make my pencil drawings a lot cleaner so that I can darken them without all the extra noise and "grit" becoming apparent (I actually cleaned it up somewhat too...it was a lot worse than what you see here in certain areas before I did that).



Here is the original pencil drawing. Feel free to comment on it as well.

furiousNU

http://www.artcorner.org/tutorials/index.shtml

Some great tutorials here!


I would consider cleaning up your line work. You have some stray lines and dots.

Also, how are you organizing your layers? It seems like you lost some depth when you blocked in your colors.

NakedElf

Personally, I find that when I draw something on paper to be completed on paper and when I draw something on paper to be completed in the computer, the style I use is very different. A paper for paper drawing will look a lot like, well, what you drew. Shadows, shading, etc. Anything which I am going to finish in photoshop does not get shading at the pencil stage, because that will all be added once it's in photoshop. (It might get areas of shade outlined/blocked out, but that's not really necessary.) I used to depend a *lot* on crasshatching in my work, and quickly discovered that crosshatched areas were really bloody annoying to color, because each little area of white between the lines had to be filled individually. Now, some coloring techniques probably get around this problem--but they're not ones I've learned.

Either way, there are lots of ways to go about coloring in PS. Mostly I'd recommend just playing around with the tools and widgets until you find a way that works for you.