Simple coloring tutorial

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Simple coloring tutorial

So since people have been asking, I’m uploading a really simple tutorial of how I color. This won’t be helpful at all as far as color selection/color theory goes (that comes intuitively with practice/observation), but hopefully it’ll help at least a few of you.

1) Gonna use a quick sketch of bby Beryl as the lineart. I just used the pen tool on Painttool SAI.

2) On a separate layer, I use the brush tool on the fine flat setting to color in the base colors for her skin + hair - leaving the eye uncolored for now

3) Added simple shading - SAI has this really excellent automatic blending. Note that I’m using purple for her skin instead of dark brown - I really dislike using just a darker version of the base color for shading because it gives the overall picture this flat dodged/burned look.

4) Colored in her eyes and added another layer of shading in the hair and shirt (highlighted her right cheek using the original base color to make it a bit more 3D). The whites of her eyes are actually a yellowish gray since actual white looks a bit too jarring in contrast to her skin tone.

5) Added highlights to her hair and erased the colors outside the lines. (Note that I basically just color everything on the same layer)

6) I use this dramatic lighting effect a lot, so I’m going to include it here. On a separate layer that I position above the lineart layer, I set my brush to white and use SAI’s watercolor brush to just lightly color slightly into the edges of the lines - good areas are where her skin meets her shirt, in the sharp lines of the hair, any corners and edges.