Art & Art Tutorials
Comic Book Coloring in Photoshop - Part 1 of 2
Intro
In this art tutorial you will learn the basics on how to digitally color your black and white comic book line art using Photoshop. The method can be applied to other image editing applications (The GIMP for example), but for this tutorial we will focus on Photoshop. First let us have a brief look at the steps on getting some colors on our line art:
Open or import the black/white line art
First you need to get your line art into Photoshop by either a) Scanning it in 300 DPI grayscale and importing it into Photoshop, or b) Open your line art as you would any other image file. Next you need to switch to RGB color mode if you haven't already done so. Change this as shown in the picture below.
Preparing for coloring
You need to make sure that your line art is the bottom most layer before we continue. If it isn't change that now. Now create a new layer just above your line art layer, select it and click the layer drop down in the layer palette and choose "Multiply". By doing this the black line art will always be visible even when you fill the layer you just created with color. The picture below shows how (don't mind the CPU meter on the screenshots). Name this layer Flats.
Apply theme color (Optional)
If you wish you can choose to set an atmosphere for the entire page by applying an overall color like all blue, if for example something eerie is happening on your page. Or perhaps orange/red if something "explosive" is happening on the page. The choices are pretty much endless but you probably get the idea. To do this select your flats layer, choose a color you like and hit ALT + Backspace and Voila! I chose blue for my page as you can see below.
Now we are rolling so lets move on to part 2 where the hard work begins.
In this art tutorial you will learn the basics on how to digitally color your black and white comic book line art using Photoshop. The method can be applied to other image editing applications (The GIMP for example), but for this tutorial we will focus on Photoshop. First let us have a brief look at the steps on getting some colors on our line art:
- Getting our black/white line art into Photoshop
- Applying basic flat colors
- Backing up our flat colors
- Applying color gradients
Open or import the black/white line art
First you need to get your line art into Photoshop by either a) Scanning it in 300 DPI grayscale and importing it into Photoshop, or b) Open your line art as you would any other image file. Next you need to switch to RGB color mode if you haven't already done so. Change this as shown in the picture below.
Preparing for coloring
You need to make sure that your line art is the bottom most layer before we continue. If it isn't change that now. Now create a new layer just above your line art layer, select it and click the layer drop down in the layer palette and choose "Multiply". By doing this the black line art will always be visible even when you fill the layer you just created with color. The picture below shows how (don't mind the CPU meter on the screenshots). Name this layer Flats.
Apply theme color (Optional)
If you wish you can choose to set an atmosphere for the entire page by applying an overall color like all blue, if for example something eerie is happening on your page. Or perhaps orange/red if something "explosive" is happening on the page. The choices are pretty much endless but you probably get the idea. To do this select your flats layer, choose a color you like and hit ALT + Backspace and Voila! I chose blue for my page as you can see below.
Now we are rolling so lets move on to part 2 where the hard work begins.