In the last post, I talked about how I develop a line drawing for an illustration. Now I'm going to walk through how I begin applying color. What I am presenting in this post is just the first part of my painting process. Basically it's a quick color study. Everything I show below came together in about an hour. In this first hour I try to establish the general colors and values of the painting. It's important to keep things loose and to think about the image as a whole. I stay zoomed out for most of this process, occasionally squinting and stepping back from the monitor for a different view.
To begin I open a new PSD in photoshop with only two layers, the background layer and the line art layer. Later I will expand to more layers, but for now I'm keeping it simple. The line layer is at 100% opacity initially. I also find that it's helpful to turn on preserve transparency for the lines so that I won't accidentally work on that layer. I always start off by filling my background with a color suited to the painting. I use a darkish green here, because I want the atmosphere of a jungle environment.
Before I place any brush strokes, I decide the location of my light source. I know that I want the girl to be the main focus, so I pick an angle for the sun that will best highlight her against the background. I grab a big round brush and set its opacity to something around 75% and start painting on the background layer.
I want the overall image to feel green, but I also want some color variation. I grab some different colors, blues, siennas, and yellows to add variety. I think about the mood of the environment while doing this. I imagine a bright warm sky with some light filtering down diffused from the trees and plants above. The atmosphere of the ruin would be darker and cooler, so I represent this using colors.
Now that the background is generally blocked in, I think about the figure. She needs to really stand out from the back wall if I want her to be the focus of the image, so I pick out bright saturated colors for her. I use an orange-red for her hair and shoes because it's a complimentary color to the green.
At this time, most of the big values are established, so I am able to lower the opacity on the lines. Having the lines faded back, allows me to see how the colors and values are holding up on their own. Without the stark lines, I notice the image needs some saturation and contrast. I open up Hue/Saturation (ctrl u or cmd u) and push around the saturation slide until I'm fairly happy with it. I know that I'm going to be upping the contrast next and that will saturate it some, so I'm sure to compensate for this now and hold back on my instincts a little bit.
Next I open levels (ctrl l or cmd l) and play around with the sliders to up the contrast.
The piece looks brighter now, but I want the blue to stand out at the bottom. I could use the brush to work this up, but I want to demonstrate another technique I use frequently. On a new layer above the background I use a gradient with my foreground color. I only want the bottom half to have color, so I have transparency as my second color in the gradient.
I then lower the opacity on the gradient layer and grab a big soft eraser brush. I set the eraser's opacity to something around 33%. I can experiment and see what looks best erased out and softened. This would also work with a layer mask. I merge this layer down once I'm satisfied with it.
The top of the image isn't looking as bright as I would like. I could go in and repaint it, but it is faster to gently brush over it with the dodge tool. The dodge tool can make colors look horrible pretty fast, so I only use it at a low exposure with one or two quick passes. A big blurry brush will help to prevent the edges of the dodge showing up too much.
I'm pretty happy with the background adjustments at this point, but the figure is too subdued. I really want her to stand out, so I grab some magenta, orange and yellow to give her more emphasis. Once that's completed, I feel pretty satisfied with the general mood of the piece. Now it's time to slow down and drag out my reference photos to start working in details.
Carolina says:
I've been looking for a tutorial like this. Thank you very much!
Posted at April 23, 2009 8:14 AMNadia says:
It was really interesting reading this! I have a very similar approach to coloring. The onlt part that's really different is the sketch part. I tend to draw in a very 2D way, my sketches are often very undynamic and static, so usually I use a very loose sketch and flatten the color and sketch layer as soon as the basic color scheme is blocked out.
Good stuff!
Posted at April 24, 2009 3:07 AMKaren says:
Thanks Carolina and Nadia! I'm glad that it's been useful.
Posted at April 27, 2009 8:40 PMNadia, I don't think your sketches are static. The looseness gives them a certain life they might not have otherwise. :)
Alex says:
Great tutorial! It's always interesting seeing how other people work. You're much more methodical than me. :)
Couple of suggestions, more for your readership than yourself, as I'm sure you know these things already:
1) when you're doing that blue gradient on a separate layer, you can also try some different layer modes, like Soft Light, Hard Light, Hue, etc. Sometimes Normal is actually what you want, but they all affect the color in different ways.
2) as you say, Dodge can uglify things pretty quickly if you don't go easy on it... I usually only use it to add lighting to specific objects, rather than adjusting my values in a whole area of the canvas - an alternative is to use a heavily feathered lasso + Levels/Curves/Hue-Sat.
Posted at April 29, 2009 3:28 PMdahuletam says:
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Posted at August 29, 2009 9:50 AMEnd of the World says:
Thank's for sharing this
Posted at October 28, 2009 2:46 AMThis is really interesting