[Angie]

At long last we're going to actually color something! But don't get too excited as this is the worst part of coloring and I hate it and it's awful and I want to cry when I have to do it. But if you've been reading these tutorials, I have given you all the tools and shortcuts I have to make it as painless as possible.

Coloring Tutorial Part 3:Flats make me cry

Remember back in part 1 when I taught you how to use photoshop actions, to remove anti aliasing on your selection tools, and how to clean your lineart? Well if not, go back and read those and get your lineart and tools prepped.

Ready?

Alright here we go!

There isn't a whole lot to cover that wasn't already covered in the first 2 parts but onward...

Using the magic wand tool go through and select the white areas of your image (lineart provided by Lysol-Jones here) like so




Then in a layer below the lineart layer (lineart again set on Multiply) use your Photoshop action from the first tutorial to expand your selection and then use the paint bucket to fill in your selection.



Rinse and repeat until your flats are complete.



The important thing to remember here is you want your layers nicely organized and labeled so you can easily find things. My system is



S=sky layer
W=walls
G=ground
Colors=character flats

I'll expand it to S2 if I have another color sky or something I don't want to put the shading layer on, but just use whatever system makes sense for you. I always keep my background layers separate from the character layers so I don't have to worry about accidentally getting something from the background layer onto the foreground. There are people that use clipping masks and such for this too, but this is the method that I know and what works for me.

Another thing to note is I can easily select each of these colors without worrying about the selection grabbing more than I want. For instance if I have 2 reds that are too similar next to each other, the magic wand is going to grab them both instead of just one of them like so

Wrong


Right


It's important to note that these likely won't be my final colors, they're a little crazy right now just so I can easily select/change things down the road. Now that we have the flats down we can start the fun shading part! Next time!