DIGITAL INKING AND COLORING
Tutorial by Tonci Zonjic tonchyz@ice.org http://tonchyz.ice.org/
Converted to ASCII text by RaD Man of ACiD Productions www.acid.org
HTML version available at http://www.ice.org/tutorials.php?tutorial9
kz
Brief Contents:
- Introduction
- From a thumbnail to final pencils
- Preparing the pencils inking
- Coloring
Introduction
Hello there. This tutorial basically shows how I work a picture out- from
a thumbnail sketch to the final piece. The primary focus of this tutorial
is inking and coloring, so conceptually and designwise its a bit crappy.
Itll do though. Time to start:
From thumbnail to final pencils
The first sketch was drawn in bed, few minutes before I fell asleep. It
took about 15-20 seconds. That evening we had a paintchat session and did
some evil proctologists- thats where the idea for this one came too, heh.
The first sketch was about 3x4.5 inches big. It served its purpose - got
down the main idea:
IMAGE 01.jpg thumbnail sketch
Next step is to work it out larger. Sheet of 80g/m2 photocopy A4 8.5x11
paper usually works good for me. For easier upsizing you can draw a grid
over the thumbnail sketch its not cheating.. As you can see I had put
up a vertical line and some horizontal ones to get the proportions rights.
Made some changes to the posture and design along.
IMAGE 02.jpg upsized sketch. a bit smaller than the full paper size
Penciling in progress. Remember to have various line widths to emphasise
the volume. This can be added later while inking, but its good to get a
habit of doing that when penciling. Thicker lines in the front, thinner in
the back. Atmospheric perspective on work. Also, dont be afraid to make
mistakes but dont go mad and scribble randomly either :. Working clean
is very good but if you work without a lightbox, tracing the the new steps
on new sheets, or inking manually and erasing the pencil underneath- things
can get messy. Photoshop can clean most of the smudges and lighter lines
with some fiddling on the Image Adjustments Levels Ctrl+L. For other
artifacts we use the eraser.
*Tip: put a paper or a paper napkin under your hand to prevent smudging
IMAGE 03.jpg penciling in progress
Finished pencils. Now, we have two options:
1 We can clean and touch up the scanned lines or
2 We can put that in a separate layer and redraw the whole mech
Both have certain advantages and disadvantages. The first one gives you a
solid base to work over- sometimes the scan is good enough to require
minimum work on it. On the other hand, sometimes itll take you more time
to clean up wobbly and gritty lines than to redraw the whole thing.
IMAGE 04.jpg finished pencils
The whole process so far took somewhere around an hour. Lots of erasing
took its toll :
Preparing the scanned linework inking
This is what the final pencils look fullsized:
IMAGE 05.jpg
Technique 1
Getting a clean look over a linework like this is not possible. So we
start cleaning up. First thing to see is if we can get anywhere fiddling
with levels, as I noted before. After that - the eraser tool. When we are
finished with erasing and touching up some lines, we start coloring.
Technique 2
No need to touch up the original scan, just make it a separate layer and
drop down the opacity to 40-50. In a new layer on top of that start
drawing with pen tool/shape tool/small brushes. Whatever you like the
most.
I decided to go with 1. Heres how that cropped part looked after I was
finished with it:
IMAGE 06.jpg
After some two-three hours of inking joys the piece looked like this:
IMAGE 07.gif all cleaned up and ready for color
Coloring
Ok. The drawing should be one layer, set to multiply. Underneath it you
can have as many layers as you want. Combined with preserve transparency
and masks, layers are extremely useful for rendering different sections. I
started with a gradient in the background layer, and a big opaque color
fill. Did it with big brushes, opacity dynamics turned off. Just plain
opaque color. When the color is inside the lines, set the preserve
transparency checkbox on for that layer. That way you can paint over it
without worrying about the edges.
IMAGE 08.jpg Gradient fill and the big section fill
Next I added a shadow be sure to make it dark enough where the object
touches the ground or itll look like its floating and some light
definition on the robot body. Big soft brushes used for both.
IMAGE 09.jpg
Now all that is left is to render the form due to defined lightsource. Not
that its an easy task sometimes. I used hard edged brushes, working in
this size what you see as fullsize accidentally saved the downscaled
version over the original- dont let it happen to ya. Lots of
colorpicking and warm colors added.
*Tip: Keep a finger near the alt key at all times to colorpick
Heres some steps during the rendering process:
IMAGE 10.jpg IMAGE 11.jpg
IMAGE 12.jpg IMAGE 13.jpg
Finished image:
IMAGE 14.jpg
Photoshop tweaks and some details added after my friends commented:
IMAGE 14c.jpg
The last few steps arent really informative, Im aware of that, but some
other time I may be competent to explain everything I did. Why did I put
the red blobs here, blue ones there? Why do the highlights look the way
they look? Playing up the materials, texture. Most of that comes with
experience and observation. Paint from life and keep looking at things.
See how the light changes. Then you can apply it to your pics just like I
did here. Still more to learn, of course. Its a life long pursuit.
Anyway, Im ramblin already : Hope this tutorial was fun and id be
really glad if you learned something. Any comments, crits, praise,
marriage proposals, reply below.
c TonchyZ / Lungbug 2002