Coloring the lines of your artwork can give your picture a more natural look, especially if you are working directly from pencils. If you are working from inks, this method might subconsciously evoke Disney-esque nostalgia in the viewer. It could be fun to experiment with using these subtle cues. How would a person perceive a profane image that subconsciously reminds them of The Little Mermaid?

This tutorial follows my work as I colored one of the panels of The Perfect Smile, a gURL.com comic. I used Photoshop 7, but surely these techniques will apply to older and newer versions of the software and its competitors to some extent. All shortcuts are for Windows. Macs arent' that different. Just use the option key instead of control, I think.

This tutorial is image intensive. Please be patient while the pictures load.

Scanning and Prepping the Line Work

Scan your work as greyscale at 600dpi. You can try 300dpi if your computer is sluggish, but don't go any lower. Erase any glaring mistakes or marks.

Adjust the levels either using Image:Adjustments:Levels or a levels adjustment layer. Try to get your lines as dark as possible without making them look smudgey while lightening the white paper to a clean, crisp brightness.

Next, make a layer called "lines."

In your channels palette, select the grey channel and load it as a selection. Select inverse (shortcut: shift+ctrl+i).

Making sure you are on your "lines" layer, fill the selection with black and deselect (deselect shortcut: ctrl+d).

Turn off the visibility of any layers below "lines". You can do this by clicking the little eye icon next to the layer you want to turn off.

Flatting

Convert the document to RGB (or CMYK if this is destined for print). When Photoshop asks if you want to merge layers: NO!

Start by making a layer under "lines" called "background" and fill it with a color that you want to base your background on. Or, alternatively, you could fill it with a really bright, garish color that will shine through any gaps you might leave in your coloring. You can then change the background color to something less disturbing after you've fixed any gaps in your foreground coloring.

For each object or group of objects, you will make a new layer. Use one layer per colored group of objects. Try to think of the layers in the picture as the layers of clothes on your characters if they were real. Skin is the bottom coloring layer. Then put on the clothes, then add things like eyes and lips and jewelry, then the hair. It's just like getting dressed! (Well, maybe if you are a drag queen.) Background objects are always on the bottom, and foreground things will always be near the top.

Now start blocking in your colors on their appropriate layers. Only use the pencil tool. The brush tool uses anti-aliasing which is only needed when you are working at low resolutions, and it makes selecting large segments of color tricky later on.

Try to take the color under the lines instead of butting up against them. If an upper layer is going to cover part of a lower layer, you can be a little sloppy with your color.

The nice part of using layers is that you can be really messy when coloring in a layer that is getting covered in part by another layer on top.

When erasing on your flats, be sure that your eraser's mode is set to "pencil" NOT "brush." Pencil mode gives you those nive, abrupt edges that you need if you want to select an entire area of color in the future.

You can flatten your colors now if you want to. I don't flatten my art work, but if your computer is slow or you have a lot of different layers, you might want to flatten in order to improve the performance of your machine. If you do flatten your color objects, you will need to be extra careful (read the safeguarding tips below). If you don't flatten, you can rely on the lasso tools and locking layer transparency to fix your mistakes.

Safegaurding

We all make mistakes. To guard against them, our best defences are channels, the history brush and periodic saving. Start by turning off the visibility on your line work. We only want your flats to show.

Turn off your "lines" layer and go to the "channels" palette and create a new channel from one of the RGB channels, preferably the one with the most contrast.

Now, if you botch shading, say, a sweater, you can go to this channel at any time, re-select the sweater, go back to the layer you were working on, and fill it with a new color. Crisis averted! That's why we've been sticking to using non-anti-aliased coloring. Those sharp edges are easy to select. You'd get nasty halos otherwise.

Before you start shading a part of your work, save your document. If you are at a tentative stage of coloring, set your history brush to your current state before you start shading. You can then use your history brush as a way to erase your present mess back to an older mess!

Shading

Use only pencil and lasso (sans anti-aliasing) tools for a cell-shaded look. Mix it up with some gradations and blurry brushes for a softer feel.

Coloring the lines

To color the lines, simply click the transparency button on the "lines" layer and select a color much darker than the color the lines crosses. Color on the lines. You won't get color everywhere because all the transparent pixels are protected.

Here is a really big shot of what coloring in the lines will look like.

Some people change the layer's mode to "multiply", but I find that it can create weird edges when something very light is on top of something very dark. In some cases it looks beautfiul and natural, but not all.

Finishing

When you've gotten everything how you like it, flatten your layers and save your picture as a copy (always keep an editable copy available for future touch-ups and changes). If destined forthe Web, change the image size to the dimensions you want. Notice how there aren't any jagged edges, even though you did not use any anti-aliased tools!

Curious about the image? You can read the full comic at gURL.com!