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Comic Style Colouring


First thing I acquired was some linework from a project I'm involved in called "Rise of Power" I double clicked the black n White image and typed in the name "ink" to promote it to a proper layer from a "background layer" and I also changed the layer settings to MULTIPLY, now I created a couple of new layers and dragged em below the inks layer I named one "skin" and one "hair" I used the the POLYGON SELECTION TOOL to select all the hair, then I filled itsolid with Blue using the paint bucket, I did the same for the skin but with a skin tone on its own layer.

image 1

This is the long boring part :) for each part I created a layer and selected and filled with a base colour and also ticked PRESERVE TRANSPARENCY on each of the colour layers, this stops you from painting outside the filled areas, also the layer order can be important here depending on how neatly you select things, I generally put things that are in front of other things on layers above them....but not always :)

image 2

Ok I saved the image and used it as a background in Cinema 4D (or any 3d renderer) I opened a model of a gun I made and scaled and aligned it as best I could with the background image and tried to match the perspective etc. OK in render settings I set the render to the size of the image (so it matched later) I set where it gonna render to and what name, tick ALPHA CHANNEL (will only render the gun now) is the background with the comic image and as you can see is the aligned gun with a few lights around.....also the render is set on BEST ANTIALIASING ;) but before you do it read the next step!!!

image 3

Ok see those 2 grey dots? the top one tells if its visible in the view and the bottom one tells if it visible in the render, so I turn off the Background in the renderer otherwise you wont get an alpha channel, and render and save as PSD etc

image 4

Open up the gun render in Photoshop and click the channels tab, now CTRL CLICK the alpha channel as shown to create a Selection of the alpha (the opaque parts)....next.......

image 5

Click the layers tab and click background (cus its greyed out I think) and CTRL C to copy

image 6

OK open up your pic so far and click the inks layer, press CTRL V to paste the gun ABOVE it, now I changed the top to red cus the blue was a bit much :)

image 7

OK now I want to delete the parts of the gun that the hands will be obscuring so I set the layer to HARD LIGHT so I can see through it and also see the linework and at this point I scaled and rotated it to fit a bit better select the polygon selection tool and I go round the parts of the hands that will be showing, the hand on the grip and the hand in front of the clip.....press DELETE and the deleted parts of the gun now show the hands when its layer is set back to NORMAL, might need a bit more tidying up etc

image 8

I then created a new layer called "outline" I CTRL CLICKED the "gun" layer to select it and went to EDIT>STROKE using black colour, set to 1 pixels wide and "outside" then Clicked OK...this outlined the gun on a layer above!

image 9

Right now we have a gun and the base colours, time for some light....Ok is basically where all the main overall light is gonna be coming from, I'll add that in first over the next few steps, then will be where the backlight comes from which I'll talk about after that....

image 10

OK on whatever layer your painting on, eg legs, skin, hair etc use the DODGE TOOL and various sized brushes whilst HOLDING ALT to lighten all the areas that are facing the light and the same again (WITHOUT holding ALT) to shade various parts that will be in shade....

image 11

I started adding some highlights and subtle shadows as well at this point. is where the overall light is coming from now we are going to add some side/backlight from where the blue blob is, it was gonna be blue but I went with green as you'll see in the next steps then changed again to orange after that :)

image 12

I merged down all the layers with colour on (except the gun cus thats above the inks) and CTRL click to get the layers selection as shown, create a new layer above and click MASK to create the black mask you see in then click the box with "2" inside it to make sure your working on the layer and not painting in the mask......

image 13

I renamed the layer "backlit" and I chose a large-ish AIRBRUSH then I picked bright green colour and brushed on some green down all the edges that face where the side/backlight is coming from, after this I start going in with smaller brushes etc and highlighting the details etc that face the backlight etc...

image 14

Heres the final CG, I changed various colours etc and keeping the backlight on its own layer allows you to use HUE/SATURATION to change its colour whenever you like. I added a background and used the airbrush to whack some colour on there, I set it in DODGE mode for the firey parts and I outlined parts of the gun in black to make it look less rendered and more comic :) i hope you found this tutorial useful.

Comic Style Colouring Tutorial: Final Result



Author's URL: Psionic3d.co.uk
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