- Outlined
Painting, Advanced CellShading and more-
(older tutorial, I left this
online because a few still asked for it)
Mainly all comical artworks have an outline, they are rarely shaded with traditional media, like pencils or similar mediums, in Manga they are usually shaded with tones, or simply with ink.
.
1.Traditional Inked
outline scanned and cleaned with Photoshop.
2.Traditional inked outline shaded with Manga-Tone, the complete
drawing is digitalized.
What is what in Photoshop?
To work in Photoshop you should know which things you will use and which things aren‘t really important for you. I made a little screenshot and will now describe the things to you which we will need to color our picture!
- At first there are
three menues in our little window there, the Layer, Path and Channel Menue.
Layer-menue: This shows all the layers we use, you can
hide and show the layers.
Channel-menue: This shows the color-channels, for example
in RGB mode you see one for RGB, one for Red, one for Green and one for
Blue.
Path- Menue: If you use a path in your picture it is
visible here, we will not need this really.
- The Layerstyles: You can use layerstyles to create
effects and lightning layers over your final pics, make a layer transpa
rent, overlay, lightened, etc. just try out all these effects and you
will see taht some are quite useful! But allways be sure that you are
in the right layer!
- Fixing all transparent pixels is a very very useful
thing! If you draw just a simply line in one layer and you check this
symbol you can paint on this layer without painting out of your line!
Just try it!
- Layer Sets are also really helpful, for example you
have 6 layers just for the shirt in your picture, put all these layers
in one layer set and you can give it a whole transparency without clicking
into all layers, etc.
- You can hide and show layers by clicking on the eye symbol on the left
side.
-Locked layers are marked with a padlock symbol, that
means something is fixed or locked in the pic, this also appears if you
check the „fix all transparent pixels“.
- Layer Effects are easy to use and can give your picture
or textual elements a nice touch, just try it out!
- Deleting a layer is quite easy, just mark the layer
and click on the trashbin.
- To create a new layer click on the paper symbol -> Create a new layer
- In the opacity field you can change the opacity of your layer or layer-set
1.1 Preparing the outline
If you want to color a outlined picture in a clear style you should also make the outline clear and ONLY the oultine. For the coloring methode we plan to use we need a pure outline without any shading. There are mainly two ways to do that, sketch a picture, scan it and make a digital inked outline, how to do this, is described in THIS TUTORIAL. Or you can ink your sketch with marker, ArtistBrushpens, or simply ink-pens. If you scan the drawing be sure that it has a high dpi, you never know if you want to print it in the end, and with 300 dpi you will get a clear and high quality print version in the end!
What do we need
in Photoshop then?
We need the scanned and cleaned outline, on a seperated layer, you should
make that with the Channel-Marking Method which is described at the
beginning.
2. The Ground-Color-Layer
At first go into your Layer-menue and create three layers, one with you outline, one you name color and one simply white one, put them in this order: from top, outline, color, white.
Now go into your color layer and take a hard pixel brush, the pencil
for example and fill the color layer with some color. You can take a
color you can see easily, for example red. Now you must re-paint your
outline and fill it with red color just in the color-layer. If you hide
the outline layer now you should see a red silhouette of your drawing.
This step is easily described on the next page with some screenshots.
If you finished your color layer be sure that you check the little quadratic
symbol wich is in a red circle on the last screenshot. This fixes all
transparent pixels in your layer and you can paint on it easily!
Now give your ground-color layer the flat colors, like you see it here
on the second pic, you can still use the pencil-bursh to do that, because
it is much easier to mark the color fields in the end!
Now take your magic wand tool and give it following settings: No aliasing, Tolerance 1 and no use in all layers! Now mark the flat color of the skin in your color layer, copy this part and paste it into a new layer, name this layer groundcolor_skin and put it into a layer-set you name skin. Be sure that you are now in your groundcolor_skin layer, check the quadratic symbol and start to shade!
Shading Tips:
1-A:
Choose a place for your light resource!
1-B: If you add a shading over the eyebrows it makes
your character look more old and grim. You can also shade some folds
there which will give an expression a more evil touch.
1-C: To make your character look older you can also
add some shading beside the chin, just try it, this is a really old-making-effect!
1-D: If you want to make something look really round
like the muscles, don‘t make the shading at the border! Shade
it like you would shade a sphere!
1-E: If you want to give a character outstanding muscles
you should shade them with really hard light!
After you added
one shading area you can add the next one with a darker color and also
two other ones with two lighter colors like I did here on the third
pic! The result we have now would be a simply cell-shading, you can
left it that way, but you can also give it a more realistic and painted
look too! Duplicate your groundcolor_skin and name it refined_skin,
also check the quadratic symbol again and go into the filter-menue,
click on blur and than on gaussian blur. Now you can blur the shading
in your skin layer! Don‘t blur it too much because wee will overwork
it per hand too in the end! You can use other blur-filters too but the
gaussian blur is the only one where you can really control the blur
status easily!
Now be sure that you are in your Refined_Skin layer, take the blur tool (the finger) and choose a brush. I chose on with more particles and a very soft edge. Now go over your blurred shading and blur it more! You can also add little folds and other colors, shiny dots etc. just refine the skin until you like it! You can see my result on the second pic.
3.2. Shading of the Outline
Go into your Outline
Layer and check the qudratic symbol, so that the padlock appears. Now
choose a dark skin color, it should be darker than the darkest one you
already used. Than paint over the outlines you want to color. You can
use darker and lighter colors on the outlines to make some more visible
and some others less visible!
3.3 Overworking
of the outlines
Now check the quadratic symbol again so that the padlock in your outline-layer
disappears. Take the smudge tool and overwork the inner outlines, for
example the nose, folds etc. you can make them just smooth or blurr
them until they are invisible, etc. just play around with the lines!
Since hair don't looks like skin or satin you should give it another look, I will give you some tipps here to get hair fast and quite nice shaded. At first make your ground shading with three or more colors, be sure that you put that suff again in a own layer and layer-set, have a look at the shot of my PS menue here.
4.1 The
Hair-smudge
You can use the smudge tool to create some nice hair-effects, if you
don't have any of these brushes you can make your own just save it as
brush-file. Be sure that you are always in the right layer when using
the smudge tool!
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