Hey guys.
I wanted to get some ideas on how to improve my digital skills, so i was wondering if anyone might be down with this. It's one of my characters from a story i have been writing for years "Attack of the Killer Pink Fluffies"
this is the color scheme for him, and i was wondering if anyone else wanted to take a crack at it, and maybe give some pointers.
perhaps then other people could post up some original b+w stuff for others to color. One of those "only post after you have colored one" deals.
just a thought, but i would love if someone would like to give me some pointers. thanks:)
Posts
My only complaint is the poop JPG quality! PNG is perfect for stuff like this where you have large areas of the same colour. It would probably be about the same size or smaller, and essentially flawless quality (lossless compression).
Here's the best linework I could find of mine, it might work to put the lineart and top, set it to multiply and color underneath.
bigger line art
As far as I got before being distracted by a squirrel.
Why this step?
I'd just bump up the contrast so it's just lines without the interior shading first though.
What, like, for inking? I always just make a copy of line art and paint on a layer underneath it. If it's being painted painted, I'd think you'd want to go over the lines anyway.
raven + orange...both looking good. you both have a better sense of light and shadows than i...dammit.
This has never happened to me. I always scan in line art at high resolution as bitmap, so there's no antialiasing to get screwed up.
Multiply does a little more than just ignoring white. For example, take a normal color like pink, paint a couple marks then peel a new layer, set it to multiply and color over those marks with the same color. You'll see that it darkens the color.
Mathematically I'm not sure how it works, but it takes whatever color your painting in and multiplies it by the color beneath it. (This usually darkens it) It just so happens that if you multiply anything by white you get the original color and if you multiply anything by black you get black. Thats why it works so well with line art. If you put the line art on top set it to multiply then everything underneath the black lines will be black and it'll ignore all the white in your lineart.
The draw back to multiply is you can't make anything lighter, you can only go darker.
EDIT: Someone needs to throw up some more line art. That was fun. Synthetic, I'm lookin' at you.
Oh yeah! I forgot it does those things too.
will edit with line work in a sec.
where's cybermonkeytron when you need him? I'll be coloring something in the next few days. I haven't done it in a while.
the closest thing I have to my own line work:
sidenote: You know what's great? When forum admins give you infractions basically for disagreeing with their opinion. Ugh, can someone go under my profile and PM me the link to my old dump thread? I might need to utilize it soon.
I might most some lines up later, I've been working on fixing up a set of really old lines (like, first thing I posted on the doodle thread here, ever) to see if I can make it look better.
edit: Wait, how the hell are you getting colouring to show up by painting underneath the lineart if the lineart layer isnt in multiply mode?
depends on what Im doing, there really is no right way to do it, just figure out what process best fits the way you want to work.
I could post some lines later if anyone is interested, but I dont clean up my sketches so they are alittle rough.
If some one wants to tackle this though:
go for it.
1. scan your line art.
2. use levels to do any necessary adjustments
3. go to channels and duplicate the blue channel
4. invert that duplicate channel (ctrl i)
5. go back to layers and make 3 new layers.
6. set the bottom layer to white or any other bg color you want.
7. highlight the top layer and go to load selection. choose "blue copy"
8. you will get an outline of ants. fill that with whatever color you want...
9. paint on the middle layer.
anyone else do this?
Wow, sorry I questioned your religion.
Scan art at 300dpi, B&W bitmap. In Photoshop, convert art to Grayscale, then RGB/CMYK. Use the Magic Wand to select all the black. Copy, paste, thus creating a new layer. Delete the original BG, create a new layer of base color/white (depending). Color on the base layer, adding new layers between the base and ink layers as needed. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes until cripsy.
Edit: It makes more sense to me because it seems a more intuitive way based on the tools I know well. Whenever I've used Multiply, it's been to darken colors on a layer. It's not immediately obvious that the tool would be used to somehow make a piece of art safe for coloring.
* The Moar You Know
What's your way Zerg?
Really, its the kind of stuff that once in a while you should mess with just to feel out what the program can do for you, PS can be a medium and not just a tool.
how do you go lighter? just make a new layer and paint over the multiply one?
I just paint the lighter colours on the multiply layer. If I want to keep the layers seperate for a more complicated work, I'll make additional layers then.
This is the multiply layer I used on the colouring from the last page. That's all.
So if they're lighter - they get darker.
If they're darker - nothing happens.
So if you set your black inks as a multiply layer and leave them on top of your image, they'll simply darken anything underneath them to black. The white paper that the inks were scanned on, however, is lighter than everything on the page and won't affect anything.
http://machall.comicgenesis.com/info/art.html
This is how Ian Mcconville (Mac Hall, 3 Panel Soul) does his colouring.
I for the most part just start stacking layers after a certain amount of base coloring, I sketch things by hand, scan them in and get something like:
and from that point I may do a little push and pull and pull of the black and white, but I don't do any inking, I set the layer to multiply, put down the basic stuff I want, and then make a layer all the way on top and just start painting. If I want black lines I paint them back in.
ala:
I like to work in a way where I feel comfortable completely wiping out part of the picture and redoing it, as if I was painting. That has maybe 3 layers, but something more fully colored has alot of layers, when I feel like Im switching gears or I want to use photoshop to my advantage to change colors and contrast and texture, thats what I do. I end up with crazy layers (20ish, on occasions) That have very little clear logic that I could number but if I slowly took layers off you'd see them build up over time.
This is fun. And good practice too... more people need to post some lineart...
Links to larger PNG version.
Man it's been a long time since I've done any inking.