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Barkode Studios 2003
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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**

-=Setting up Layers

-= AFlat Colors

 

Continue on to Part 3