Coloring in Photoshop

This tutorial features one of our great friends, Jason Smith, sketches. It shows you how to turn an ordinary B&W sketch into a magnificent painting!

1. Open up a sketch of drawing that you have scanned in or found. Make sure that you have permission from the owner to use it. I have gotten permission from Jason Smith to use one of his great drawings. You however are not aloud to publish your work anywhere if you choose to practice with his drawing:

2. The first thing I usually do when brushing a drawing is make a base color for everything first. To do this, select a medium sized brush (40-60px), with 0% hardness, and start filling in everything in your image. Set this layers blending mode to Multiply:

3. Now, pick out a few more base colors until you have all the different parts of your drawing with a basic color. Do not try to shade or anything yet:

4. Now, using a finer brush (5-15px), with 0% hardness, go back over the base colors with more detail. Try to make everything fit inside the lines, and add some of the minor colors (like the white in the eyes, and the fingernails). You will want to zoom in for this part so you can edit it easier. DO NOT USE ANY BLACKS YET!

5. Still staying zoomed in, select a fine eraser tool. Erase anything that has gone over the lines it should fill, and then go back and brush it in with a fine brush again. This is basically the color in the lines step:

First use a larger eraser brush to erase things that go way over:

Now use a smaller eraser to get rid of marks like this (zoomed in):

Use Very fine (3px) erasers to get rid of places like this:

And now correct the inside brushing:

Use a Small brush to fill in areas like this correctly

And areas like this will require a very fine brush

6. Make a new layer, and using a fine black brush, begin to color over some of the lines:

7. Now use the Dodge and burn tools to start shading the drawing. First lets shade. Select the Burn tool from your tool bar:

8. Now set it up like so:

9. The dodge and burn tools are used like the brush tools. The difference is that instead of choosing a color, these tools will lighten or darken a previous color. Just brush over a color that's already there and watch it work! Make sure you are in the layer with the colors. Shade on the opposite side of where your light is coming from (NOTE: YOU MAY NEED TO CHANGE THE BRUSH SIZE FOR DIFFERENT PARTS!). Also, if you want to make different burn effects, change the range from highlights, or shadow:

10. Now use the dodge tool (right next to burn tool on tool bar), and highlight it on the opposite side of where you dodged:

Click to enlarge

11. Looks a lot more colorful! Usually at this point, I start messing with the smudge tool and work on the hair and other minor effects:

Good Luck! And have fun!