Coloring
Walkthrough
Now that you've
got your line art all prepped with blackness, its time to lay
down some flats.
Contrary to how most people think things are colored [with the
magic wand and fill tool/gradients] there's actually kind of a
process in prepping the lines for flats to go on
Here's a lil step by step in how i prep my lines and lay down
flats
1. Make sure you have your layers menu up and viewable [also make
sure you've switched back into RGB mode. Just go up to
Image>Mode>RGB color]. If for some reason you cant find it
just head up to Window>Show Layers and it should pop up
After its up you should see just one layer [the line art]. If for
some reason you have more just press and hold ctrl+shift+e and
it'll flatten the layers down
After you've got that done you right click on the layer [should
say background] and select duplicate layer. Upon doing that the
new layer you've created should be highlighted. You'll wanna
click on the pull down menu that says "Normal" in it
and select multiply
The lines should get a bit darker and thicker [which is good]
2. Next you click on the original bkg layer and you create two
[2] new layers [shift+ctrl+n] and take the layer closest towards
the bottom and fill it white. This should make the line art go
back to the way it was before the whole multiply deal. Now you
just click on the blank transparent layer on top of that and this
is where you'll begin painting your flats
If you're lost [which im sure some of you are] here's a run down
of how things should look in the Layers box
Background Copy [set to multiply]
Layer 2 [where you paint your flats]
Layer 1 [filled white]
Background
What I personally do to paint flats is i just simply use the
brush tool [just push "b" to access it]
**One little tip to make that go about faster is when you click
on one space with your color a dot of that color should show up.
Then you hold down shift and click somewhere else and it'll
create a nice perfectly straight line of that color. Play around
with it and you'll learn how to manipulate it as well as I can
Also, be sure to interchange your brush sizes. Like using a
smaller brush size for small corners and a bigger brush size for
'UGE spots
You can change brush sizes by simply pressing the " [ "
and " ] " keys**
Continue on to Part 3
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