Basic CG: Preparation and Intro to Coloring

Written by: Wei-Ling Lorelai Wu
Please do not copy this tutorial without permission.

Part II: Preparing the Canvas

Now it's time to prepare our coloring canvas! We want to make it so that we don't have to worry about coloring over our inking work. There are several ways to do this, such as turning on 'Multiply' on the layers, but I prefer having a dedicated 'outline' layer, which consists of nothing but a 'skeleton' outline. This might be complicated in the beginning, but once you understand how it works, you'll find many variable ways to do this! ^_^

First, go to the 'Layers' Panel. Double-click the layer called 'Background' and then click 'OK.' This simply renames the layer to 'Layer 0' and gives it normal layer properties (the background layer in Photoshop, by default, cannot be made transparent and other such nonsense crap, I'm not sure why).

Make sure your file is set to RGB mode. This is very important, as it's probably in a default grayscale mode, since we scanned in grayscale. Now, go to the 'Channels' tab in Photoshop. click on the dotted circle...this will select a bunch of stuff in your picture. Now, go back to the 'Layers' tab (to the left of 'Channels') and click the 'Preserve Transparency' option box. Make sure...is the background layer a COPY, and not actually the default background layer? is 'Preserve Transparency checked? are you in RGB mode? have you pressed the dotted circle button, and are there now lots of selection lines on your drawing? Check check check...Yes? ok, now press 'Delete'...and BOOM!!! All the white in the picture is gone!!! But so is some of the black...we'll fix this in a second.

Take your largest size airbrush tool, select the 'black' color, and, with the selection and 'Preserve Transparency' still on, color over the entire picture with black. This will restore the original opacity of black to the picture! ^_^ After you're done coloring, create a new layer, call it 'Background' (make sure you drag it so it's under the 'outline' layer) and fill it with white.

I like this method because it assures me smooth coloring under the black outline...for instance, if you tried multiply, you might end up with funky color overlay, and if you tried this method in Grayscale mode, you'd get awful looking pixellated junk at the edge of your black lines...This method works for even really really rough black lines, as you can see from my example above, drawn with graphite pencil. Here's the other sketch, inked, that I applied this method to: I'll be continuing the tutorial with this picture.

• Inked and Ready
• Adjusting Contrast/Brightness to get remaining sketchmarks out of the picture
• Deleting all the white out of the picture
• Ready to go: we have an 'Outline' layer and a 'BG' layer

Continue to Part III: Coloring on the Computer