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© Hiwatari Ki.
2004 - 2009.

Colouring Tutorial

I usually colour the skin of the character first. So choose a skin colour, somewhere between orange and yellow would be nice, depending on if you want your character to have darker or lighter skin. Choose a round brush that fades at the edges, a smaller size between 20~40 pts will be best (for me). Opacity of the brush is 15% (I am more used to this number). A larger percentage means more colour will be used per stroke. So, just colour away =D Put more strokes at areas where you think the shadows are.

Try to colour everything of the same colour in one go, because you may not be able to choose the exact same shade of colour when you colour something else first, unless you write down the colour code. Usually for manga style colouring, I put both base and shadowing colours on the same layer, since shadowing only depends on the opacity of the brush. You can separate different things into different layers is you like, for due to ease and laziness I am putting everything I coloured on one layer, except th background. This image shows all the skin colour done.

After the skin, I usually colour the hair. Hair can be considered as one of the parts that takes me the longest to colour... Usually I use two different colour layers for hair, except for black. In this case it is black, so I only have one layer. Stroke along the strands of hair where you think shadows should be applied. Opacity is about 30% (since I am lazy, in the past I used 15%). More strokes on the darker parts.

Yay, so hair is done. Let's work on some simple accessory - namely the tie. First choose a base colour and a shadowing colour from the saeme hue. I usually use two colour layers for everything, even for black (the base layer is dark gray) if I am not colouring hair.

Apply the base colour first. Opacity around 30 again. Larger percentage if you want to have more colour for each stroke. I don't recommend too large or too small a brush. Try to use a brush that is around 30% to half the narrowest dimension of the area you are colouring.
Note: I use the lasso tool because I can work faster with the strokes. You can also colour without the lasso tool if you are good at using the tablet. The bad thing of lasso tool is that it may not be able to select corners or narrow areas so you will need to touch up on the colours later =D)

After the base colour, apply the shadowing colour. You can see the difference between the two colour layers in the above image. Make sure you don't make the colours solid unless you are colouring anime style (This tutorial is manga style colouring. Why are you here? XD)

Next is the eyes. It is pretty much similar to how I coloured the tie earlier, but the shadowing colour is to be applied from the top. Also, use the burn tool on the top part of the eye to make it look darker and the dodge tool on the bottom to make it shine =D

After that, colour the rest of the image using the same method as the tie. It is pretty easy once you get the hang of it. For white coloured items, I usually use a light bluish colour for the shadowing, but you can use other colours such as light gray as well =)

After you finished colouring, check your image to see if there are any places that need some touch-ups. Since I use the lasso tool when I colour, there are quite a few spots... You can touch up with a brush or simply the pencil tool with the dropper tool to select the same colour.

So the colouring of the main items are now done. View the whole image on the window screen to ensure that you are satisfied with the colours. If not, you can still change by selecting the items from the selection layer (the bottom-most layer you made when you set up the photoshop file) and change the hue or strokes etc.

Now, let's move on the to the background. For lazy people like me I usually put colours as backgrounds instead of drawing them... of course, you can (and it is actually much nicer) to draw your own backgrounds and colour them as well! Now to make nice colour backgrounds, first open a new layer and apply a random dark colour to it below your colouring layer. Then, use the magic eraser too (the one that erases backgrounds) and erase the background of the colouring layer. I use this method because the background will look better in terms of overall image if you work on it on the whole canvas size.

For this image, the background is kind of dark because it is night time. I use a dark blue layer with random brush strokes of black. The brush I used is a faded brush with opacity around 30%. Work on the background till you are satisfied. You can also use a lot of colours or use the built-in gradient in the program (the noise samples are pretty nice in mu opinion =D)

Draw in a simple moon and some while smoke as the background... remember to put some shadowing on the background as well so that people will not think you are very lazy XD Okay, now, You are DONE!!

This is pretty much how I colour my images at present. Please move onto the toning tutorial by the back button and the link at the bottom of the tutorial page. Thank you for reading and I hope you find this information at least a bit helpful =)