Cómics, Mangas, Comunidad!

Lazy Coloring Step by Step

I was asked many times how I make my pictures, asked about tutorials of my coloring methods and every time my answer was that there’s a lot of tutorials presenting the way I color, made by really awesome people already and there’s really no need for me to make just another one. It’s like these eye drawing tutorial, they are most of the time the very same thing just personalized to those artists’ need. And same thing is with my coloring - making another tutorial of it is really not necessary. So I'll just present you few the most crucial steps of my coloring process so you could get a hint what methods I use and what tutorials you should look for if you're interested with discovering more.

I use Photoshop CS 6 with layers set on different blending modes. Whole picture usually takes around 10 - 15 layers, it’s only because much too many times in my life I painted something on wrong layer and I’m just paranoid so I make everything on separate layers just for my own peace . I’m not gonna explain here Photoshop options, I’m sure if you don’t know how Layer Blending Modes work and you’re interested you may google it by yourself, find it out and practice some to check how colors act in different blending modes, when you should choose darker colors, when brighter, when you should change opacity to make them look better, less or more vivid etc. It’s a matter of practice.

★ All my layers are set above Sketch (picture 1).

★ You can see there Multiply, to cover whole silhouette (picture 2),

★ Then another Multiply to add shadows, Overlay and Soft Light to add light, the white lines on the line art and in hair are Normal layer, they make everything looks like more detailed. (picture 3)

★ Next I add colors by Overlay layer for skin, Multiply for darker colors and other layers depending of what effect I want to get (picture 4).

★ And at the end I add some additional details if needed, textures on Overlay layer, I add some gradients here and there, I change Contrast/Brightness, colors by Selective Color or Color Balance options, add some Photo Filter if needed and do all these cosmetic thingies until I’m happy with final effect. I use Sharpen or Blur sometimes. And I guess that’s all.

All these things are my personal preferences and it's absolutely not the one and only right way of using blending modes, it's all very flexible so you just have to experiment and figure out by yourself how you wanna use them to fit your needs~

Picture is a commission for *CamilliaTepes Thank you so much!