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This tutorial will cover the basics of coloring a fanart on photoshop. I have PS 7.0, so I don’t think anything below 5.0 will work for this tutorial. I hope you find this useful, and no stealing this tutorial!
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Preparing the lines.
The key to coloring fanart, is to have patience, and good lineart. Without patience, you’re going to get frustrated and try to rush, therefore making your coloring less than satisfying to you in the long run. Without good line art, you’re going to spend more time outlining the lines by hand with a mouse or tablet, than actually coloring it.
The first step is to fix up your sketch a bit before scanning it. I usually use soft, smooth paper, like printing paper to draw on. Another good, cheap brand is Art Street and Midwestern Home products. This decreases the amount of dots and lines produced by heavy paper when scanning, and overall makes your job a lot easier. Then, outline your pencil drawing with a pen. A regular ink pen is fine, but I would suggest a Pilot with a v5, extra fine point.
After you’ve successfully outlined, erased smudges and sketch lines, and wiped off the eraser fragments, scan your picture. I use either 300dpi setting, or a 200dpi setting for scanning. Make sure the picture is straight; you don’t want to adjust the entire image because it’s tilted a little. After scanning, open it in Photoshop. We’re ready to prepare the line art.
1: Press Ctrl and L to get the levels toolbar. In the first box, I always put 115, and in the last one (leave the second one alone) I put 193. This will clean up any dust specs and leave your paper squeaky clean, and will make the line art darker.
2: Press Ctrl and U to get the Hue/Sat toolbar. Set the hue to –100 and the saturation to –100, this will delete all the colored pixels within your line art.
3: Save what you have so far under JPG format.
4: Make a new channel by clicking the arrow at the top right of the channel options, located at the top right of the screen.
5: Name it line art, make sure Masked Area’s is selected, the opacity is 100% and the color is black.
6: Set your foreground color to white (the squares at the bottom of the long, skinny one you can move) and the background color to black.
7: Set foreground color to white, and press alt and backspace to fill the picture with white.
8: Now, while pressing the Ctrl key, go up to channels and click on the blue channel. This will make your line art a selection, and go up to Selection>Inverse.
9: Make the foreground black, and hit alt and backspace to fill your line art selection with black.
Now we’re done with the first half. Not to fret, the second half is pretty easy and takes less time. For me, at least.
Oh no! You may be thinking, as you stare at the uneven, rough lines on your line art. Don’t worry, this happens to just about anyone, but it’s pretty easy to fix.
1: Click on your Polygonal lasso tool (either behind the lasso tool or the Magnetic lasso tool) and go over the edges of your line art, outside, or inside, but not at the same time. Once you’ve selected the bit you want to fix, take the hard round brush and go over the outside. This will make your lines smooth, and ready to color.
Now onto the part you’ve been waiting for!
Finally! Coloring the picture!
Hallelujah! We finished making the lineart! Are you dead? Dying? Bleeding? No? Good! We can proceed with the coloring part!
The first thing I would do is figure out your base colors. The base colors are what you’ll eventually be shading, and they have to be on separate layers. This will make it much, much simpler to shade your picture; so don’t forget to put different layers! If you have more than one person in the picture, it will look better if you have varied skin tones. Like, if you would color someone’s shirt, you make a new layer at 100% opacity and name it shirt. If you were to color skin, make a new layer and name it skin.
One thing I’d like to stress is color coordination. No, not if the colors are clumsy. It means weather or not your colors are pleasing to the eye. Here are some common examples of do’s and don’ts:
Don’ts:
1: Yellow on black. No, just no, no, no no! Not only does this draw your attention to too many things at once, it also is very stressful on the eyes. This especially applies for backgrounds and clothing.
2: Bright, big backgrounds on smaller, darker foregrounds. This is a big don’t do, almost as big as yellow on black. If you put big, colorful backgrounds, such as pink, yellow, green, and orange, it distracts your eyes from your foregrounds. It will make it much worse if your foregrounds happen to be small. You want your foreground about as big, or slightly smaller than your backgrounds. If your backgrounds are huge and bright, then your foreground is small and darkly colored; your eyes will try and take in too many things at once. What do you think people will notice first? Big, vibrant backgrounds with small, dark foregrounds?
3: Checkered anything. Please, just don’t do it. The only time checkers fit with a picture is with Optical illusions or chessboards. I don’t think I need to say anything more.
4: Orange and black. Just like yellow on black, this is no exception. Sure, it looks nice and Halloween like, but other than that, it’s an eyesore to look at. A little is okay, but not great amounts.
5: Any bright, flamboyant color with black, other than white. On certain occasions, white may not look good with black, so be careful about those two.
Do’s:
1: Soft, pastel colors. Yes, unlike the ones above, these colors are pleasing to the eye and, if chosen correctly, can make your picture all the better. Good pastel colors are baby blue, soft yellow or green, light violet and other such colors.
2: Baby blue and a slightly darker blue. Not only will these two colors complement each other, they also don’t draw too much attention to either one. This works exceptionally well with white, as well.
3: Pale pink and white. If used correctly, like baby blue and dark blue, these two do work well together. But don’t overdue it, too much pink will ruin a picture.
4: Dark red and black. Ooh, gothic like! Despite how it sounds, a dark red and black do look good together. Just make sure your red isn’t too bright.
Okay, since we’ve got that part down, we can move on. The only type of coloring I know how to do is with airbrushing, which is using your burn tool with a soft setting. If you want to learn cell shading (traditional anime shading) look someplace else.
Unfortunately, the dodge and burn tool won’t work on very dark colors, like black. So if your picture has someone with black hair, just pick a dark blue, and go over the highlight parts with a soft, round brush. But we’ll get to more detail later.
Shading your picture.
Yay! My favorite part! Although there’s a lot to know about proper shading and where to put it, I’ll just put the basics of shading things here. The key thing to remember is, if your light source is coming from the left, to shade things on the right. If your light source is coming from above, shade the things under it.
Okay, here are some tips for shading before we go on:
1: If you’re shading the face, make sure you leave things like cheekbones, the curve under your eyes, the tip of the chin, the center of the forehead, and the center of the bridge of the nose lighter. A good way to do this is take the soft white brush and go over those parts. These parts are like that because they stick out more than the rest of the face.
2: For shading the face, it’s good to put a little shading under the bottom lip, a tiny bit under the eyebrows, around the eyes (but not too much) some under the nose, and if the cheekbones are visible, a little under the bottom of them. You also need to put shading under the jaw, and if you’re face is in a ¾ view, atop the jaw line also.
3: For shading legs and arms, there’s not much you need to do. Just shade once or twice over your base color, and go over the center of the leg/arm with a soft white brush. If your leg or arm is bent, be sure to put shading where the arm/leg is bent, meaning the elbows and knee joints.
4: For shading clothes, remember to shade in the direction the clothes are hugging the body. Say, if someone’s shirt wrinkled at the hip, to put small lines of shading leading to the wrinkles; if the wrinkles are on the right hip, put the lines dragging to the right, and so on and so forth.
5: This also applies to how the person is standing, walking, or laying down. If your person is just standing there, and the center of light comes from above, put a small circle of shading over his/her shoulders and to the neck. This way, it’ll make the head look like it’s actually resting on the neck. If the person is lying down, and light is coming from the right, just make a small oval like shading on the opposite side the light is coming from.
6: Now, if you’re a detail freak like I am, and want to shade your hands, here are some good tips also. Hands are difficult to do, because they’re oddly shaped and have fingers. I really can’t give you much on hands, except to look at your own, and figure out where to put the shading at different angles.
Putting highlights in hair.
This step is one I like to do also. Everyone has a different way of shading hair, some just use the dodge tool and go over the hair in half circles, and leave it at that. I like my hair to look fluid and look like it has actual strands going through the highlights. So here is the easy way to do it.
1: If you’re putting highlights on black hair, obviously the dodge/burn tool isn’t going to work. When I do black hair, I use a dark blue to put the “base” of the highlights. Other people use white, but I like dark blue the best. Like with shading clothes, you want your highlights to go in the direction the hair is. If your person’s hair is going right, put the highlights swooping to the right. But remember to make them uneven not straight. Also remember to use relatively small, soft round brushes for this, I usually use a 6,8, or 9-sized one.
2: But what if the person has blonde, brown, or red hair? You usually don’t need to put “base” highlights on these ones; you can just go straight to the dodge tool and don’t have to worry about those. I would put the dodge tool on Highlights if you’re doing this with hair though.
3: This is how I make it look like individual strands. First you want to blur your highlights, and highlights only, with the blur tool set around 70-80 percent strength.
4: Once you’ve done that, you can use the smudge tool, set about 6-7-8-9, and no larger. If you put it any larger than that, chances are you’ll just end up with a mess. Stretch the tips of the highlights out a bit, to make them look somewhat pointed and thin. Then you put your smudge tool a little above or below the highlight, and drag the color into it. Again, you want to make the colors going into the highlight somewhat pointed. Something to remember is not to put them too close or too far apart.
5: Yes! Now you’re almost done! For the final step in highlights, take the dodge tool, and set it under Highlights, obviously. You want the first one to be big, but small enough to leave some room on your highlights. Then, make that smaller, so that it’s both smaller than the base color and the first highlight. Just go through the middle of the highlight once or twice, and you’ve got it!
Now, onto the last and final part folks!!
Coloring the eyes.
There are many different ways to color the eyes. But this is just my way of doing them.
1: First you want to fill them both with black. Then, choose the color your eye wants to be, and take the small round brush again. After you’ve got it where you want it, make a kind of half oval at the bottom of the eyes, leaving enough black at the top.
2: Take the dodge tool, set it at an even smaller soft round brush, and go over the middle of the eye color in another half oval.
3: Pretty cool huh? Now to add the last part, is to again get the small, soft round brush, and pick the color white. Then, you just click once over the black part of the eyes, and you’re done! You can add more, smaller dots in there also.
FINISHED!!!