Basic Colouring in PSP - A Solid Foundation | First Page | Forum

Gaia Forums » GAIA Community » Chatterbox

1 - Not helpful at all, waste of your time to write this.		0.0%	[ 0 ]
2		25.0%	[ 2 ]
3 - Eh. I learned some new things but...		12.5%	[ 1 ]
4		0.0%	[ 0 ]
5 - Decent enough, all in all. I learned and will consider using this method in the future.		62.5%	[ 5 ]
Total Votes:	[ 8 ]

Report ad

Kiwi Squirt Bottle

(?)Community Member

Tipsy Enabler

Offline

Post: 11677866_1 created on Wed, 04 Jan 2006 21:10:55 +0000
Posted: Wed, 04 Jan 2006 21:10:55 +0000

A "How do I colour lineart" tutorial for PaintShop Pro.
By Andanielle

Description: A tutorial on setting up the foundations for easy colouring, espescially if you'll be colouring the same lineart over and over again.
Difficulty: 1/5

Note: This tutorial was written for the 'Color My Fancy' guild and may only be reproduced by them if they see fit. Any reproduction elsewhere of this tutorial without permission from me is not allowed. Violaters will be delt with accordingly.

User Image - Blocked by "Display Image" Settings. Click to show.

Version used: 8
Easily adaptable for: Versions 9 and X
Can be used for earlier versions?: Unknown (if you use this tut for an earlier version of PSP with ease, let me know?)

Lineart used: Here
Artist: J "NeonDragon" Peffer
Disclaimer from site: Here is a selection of line art that you may color for practice or personal enjoyment. This lineart is oversized, usually at around 100-150dpi. Save it to your computer to print out and color by hand, or import it into a program like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Painter, or Open Canvas to color.

If you would like to post the colored artwork on your personal website, that is fine. Please leave the neondragonart.com logo intact. If you remove it, you must place a link back to neondragonart.com somewhere near the image as being the source of the work. Do not enter the colored work into contests, publish it, or use it for career advancement please. These drawings are for practice and personal use only.

Please feel free to use the provided lineart to follow along if you wish. However, please do not violate the disclaimer.

Kiwi Squirt Bottle

(?)Community Member

Tipsy Enabler

Offline

Report Post
Post: 11677866_2 created on Wed, 04 Jan 2006 21:25:39 +0000
Posted: Wed, 04 Jan 2006 21:25:39 +0000

No matter what version of Paintshop Pro I've used and how many ways I've attempted to colour, I've come to realise that for me at least, the basis to a picture that gets lots of compliments instead of an, "Oh, that's nice, uh huh" is one in which I laid a solid foundation for before even considering what exact shade of green I'm going to use to highlight the skin or even where the light source is, not to mention it makes things easier in the long run, espescially if you're colouring pets for a B&C shop that all have the same lineart.

This may seem like boring tedious stuff and you might be wanting to just get on with the colourin' - have patience and it'll pay off (though you can just skip it all and spend lots of time erasing later.

First, I like to take whatever lineart I'm using and eliminate all the unnecessary bits, the white parts that generally have no effect on the lineart what so ever. Make sure that your background layer has been converted to a raster layer. Right click on the background layer and chose "promote background layer".

-->

Once it's a raster layer, use the freehand selection tool to select a bit of the white part. Make sure it's ONLY the white bits, not any of the lineart at all.

-->

Then go to the Selections drop down menu, hold your mouse over Modify, then chose Select Similar on the submenu that drops down.

Almost immediatly, this window pops up:

Let's see if I can explain this so that you know a bit about what's going on and don't get very confused when you use this ability later. ^.^
What You've Selected: This will show you the bit's you've selected in relation to the rest of the picture.
What It'll Select: This shows you what will be selected based on the settings below. If you don't see much of your picture, click in the square and drag until you see what portion you want.
Tolerance: What level of tolerance it'll have when selecting similar colours; the more tolerant it is, the more lenient it'll be when selecting a colour. If you had a picture with lots of green in it, but you wanted it to only select one specific shade of green, then you'd want it to be a lower value. If you wanted to select ALL the green, it'd have a higher value. When working with black and white linart, it usually doesn't matter what value is there, though the higher it is the more unwanted grey bits it'll pick up too.
Contigious: Select this if you want it to select similar colours of your selection that touch your selection.
Discontigious: Select this if you want it to select similar colours of your selection through out the picture, regardless of if they touch or not.

Make your options appear as mine (though have a bit of fun playing with the tolerance levels if you want. ^.^) and click okay. Your image should now appear like this with the "ants" crawling all over it, then hit the delte key on your keyboard.to remove all the white and leave only the lineart.

-->

Go back to the Selection menu and tell it to Select None to get rid of the "ants."

Now that you've worked so hard to get your lineart the way you want it, we wouldn't want to mess it up by colouring directly on that layer, now would we? Instead, let's add a new layer under it (as generally we want the linart as close to the top as possible so we don't always have to colour inside the lines... We can colour under them and no one will much notice. ~.^
To add a new layer, go to the Layers drop down menu and click "New Raster Layer..."

A box will pop up where you can name your layer, tweak it's properties and so on so forth. All you really need to do right now is to name it and click okay. This layer is something I like to add for my own sanity, so that it looks like I'm colouring on a background. This way, if I change the opacity of a layer, it'll show up as it would on the background, instead of sorta transparent. You don't have to if you want, but I find it helps me. ANYways, just Name it something (I usually use "bakground" or "bkg" so that I know what it is) and click okay.

Now, if you look at your layers palate, you might notice that the BKG layer is abouve the lineart layer (Raster 1) and it should be under it instead. If you click on the BKG layer, you should be able to drag it under the lineart layer. As you're dragging it, you might notice a little guide bar underneath - when the bar is under the lineart layer, just let go. Your BKG layer should now be under your lineart layer.

-->

Now, to fill in the background with it's colour (like I said, I prefer white though use whatever you'd like), select the fill bucket from the tools palate (the vertical strip of pictures on the right hand side of the screen) and make sure one of your colours is white.

If you have the background colour set to white, then you'll have to right click on the BKG layer to fill it with white. However, if your foreground colour is set to white (where my black is) you'll need to left click on the BKG layer to fill it with white.

Now, your background should be white and below the lineart layer.

However, the BKG layer isn't for colouring on, it's just there to make life easier. ^.^ Instead, add a new raster layer, making sure you're on the BKG layer still (it'll be highlighted in your layer's palate). However, instead of going to the drop down menus at the top, there's another way to add a layer with a click of your mouse. On the layer's palate, there's a series of buttons up top. If you click the leftmost one, you'll add a new layer, which we'll call Skin, and say okay.

-->

Go back to the tools palate and select your paintbrush (size 16, hardness 100, opacity 100), load it up with a colour (I used a web-safe blue) and start colouring away on the skin, making sure to keep in the right area and not go out of bounds.

But you may notice something as you colour - your lineart layer still has bits of gray that are showing.

To fix this, double click on the lineart layer (Raster 1) in the layers palate and change the blend mode to multiply and click okay.

This will change the grays to blend with the colours behind them and resulting in a cleaner picture.

If you're working with complicated lineart, you may find it helpful to place little spots of colour where the skin is just to remind yourself. When you're zoomed up close, you can sometimes get confused as to what is what.

Keep colouring away until all the skin is coloured, being careful not to colour anywhere else. Change the size of your brush as needed, but always keep the hardness and opacity at 100. When you're done with the skin, it should look like this, (the second image is what just the skin layer looks like without the lineart layer.)

So now that the skin is all blue, it's time for a new layer, the shirt this time, I think.So making sure we're still on the skin layer (it'll be highlighted) add a new layer and call it Shirt.

-->

But now that we have the skin coloured, we don't want to accidently overlap it with the colour for our shirt layer. I've found a rather easy way to colour touching sections without overlapping the colours. Go back to your skin layer, and with the magic wand tool, click on a coloured section of skin.

Again, we want to select all of the blue on this layer.

-->

Now that we have all the blue selected, we want to invert our selection Go to the Selection menu, and click "Invert". This will select everything that wasn't selected before and unselect what was selected.

Now go back to your Shirt layer, which we'll colour on.

You may be asking why we did that, what the point was. By selecting everything that isn't the skin, we set up a boundry of sorts. We can colour only inside the boundry, meaning not on the skin and overlapping it. ^.^ This should help: (the circle you're seeing is the boundry of my paintbrush.)

-->

Once more with your handy dandy paintbrush (again, size 16ish, hardness 100, opacity 100) this time loaded with a DIFFERENT colour than what you did for the skin (I used red) start colouring, ignoring the "ants" (though I know they can be annoying) but still being careful to stay within the other boundries. You should end up with something like this:

Or this, without the lineart:

Once, you're happy, with it, invert the selection again, then, on the Shirt layer, select the shirt with your magic wand.

Note: You cannot use the Selections -> Modify -> Select similar to get the red as well as the blue as they are on different layers AND are different colours.

Now, add a new layer, titled "Hair" and go ahead with colouring the hair, again using a different colour from the others and keeping the hardness of your brust set to 100. Keep adding and colouring on more layers, keeping each sort of item together on the same layer. For instance, on this one, I did the shirt as a whole on two different layers (the Shirt layer and later, the zipper layer). If you wonder if something should have it's own layer or not, think ahead to your final colouring. Are the shirt and it's zipper the same colour? Do you want them to be on seperate layers for ease of colouring later? What about the collar around her neck - are those studs the same colour as the rest, part of the same material, or something altogther different. On her shirt, you could have decided that the jewels on the straps belonged on a layer not part of the Shirt itself. It's all up to you. I ended up with something close to 15 layers for this picture, including the lineart and BKG layer. Just don't get too layer happy. ^.^

So what? You just spent a long time putting things on to different layers in colours that might have no effect on the end picture at all, and I spent hours writing a tutorial for this? What was the point? This allows you later to not have to worry about colouring inside the lines later on. You can worry more about getting your picture decent without worry about what if a bit of the shirt sneaks on to the skin and you forgot to erase it and it's too late now.

See, let's say I wanted her shirt to be of a sort of leopard print with underlying swirls of paleness. If I colour on a new layer abouve the shirt, I can then go back and with three clicks of my mouse, have it cleaned up nicely without having to erase for forever.

-->

(That was done in a few brush strokes using a pattern, a paintbrush, and a bit of the warping tool. Not my best bit of work to say the least, but it gets the point across.)

Kiwi Squirt Bottle

(?)Community Member

Tipsy Enabler

Offline

Report Post
Post: 11677866_3 created on Wed, 04 Jan 2006 21:33:50 +0000
Posted: Wed, 04 Jan 2006 21:33:50 +0000

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to get in touch with me.
PMs or MSN messenger is a good way.
Don't worry, I don't bite... Hard. biggrin

Also, please don't post comments here;
If you feel you must comment, feel free to do so in the guild's PSP thread. ^.^